The Call of the Void
by Energybeing
Summary: If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you. Did you ever wonder what the abyss might see?
1. Chapter 1

Author's note: I do not own Buffy or Doctor Who. Please don't sue me for using them.

This story begins at the start of Buffy season 6 and at no particular point in the Doctor Who timeline.

* * *

 _He stood a stranger in this breathing world,_

 _An erring spirit from another hurled_

-Lord Byron.

* * *

It was dark.

That was the first thing that Buffy noticed, when she awoke. She noticed it before she even became aware that it was she who noticed it. She opened her eyes, or at least she assumed she did, because there was no difference either way. The darkness was there, pressing down on her.

Buffy couldn't think of any reason as to why she might be somewhere so overwhelmingly dark. The last thing she could remember was –

Then there was a slight fuzziness in her thoughts, and when it was finished Buffy felt perfectly sure that she had fully recalled her last memory, processed it and realised that it had nothing whatsoever to do with her present situation. She was completely unaware that she had in fact done none of these things.

Buffy didn't lie there long. A tentative exploration revealed that she was in a small box. It was soft, as though it was lined with something. Obviously, it was designed to keep her lying down, because with all her strength she couldn't shift the lid at all.

So Buffy lay back and pondered the situation. She was alone. She had to get out by herself or not at all. She couldn't stay there for ever, after all. She had things to do.

Buffy scratched at the lid, trying to move it even slightly. Realising the futility of trying to put pressure on an immovable object, she decided that the only way to get free was to break out. If she couldn't open the box, she could at least break through the lid.

So she did, and she was promptly covered in a deluge of dirt. Okay. So she was buried. Buffy knew what they called boxes that held people that got buried. Coffins. But she wasn't dead. Wasn't a vampire either, not if her heartbeat was anything to go by.

Well, she should probably get out then. Her being buried alive didn't help anyone, least of all herself. She couldn't do anything if she was left to rot underground.

So she clawed her way to the surface, sweeping dirt behind her, scrabbling her way to the surface. It didn't take as long as she had expected. Perhaps she hadn't been buried as deeply as she would have thought.

Before she had even realised that she was free, Buffy noticed how bright everything was. There was light everywhere, from streetlamps to starlight. It had been so long since she had seen light. Her eyes watered as they adjusted.

Buffy scrubbed at her eyes with a sleeve, and looked around. She was definitely in a cemetery. She knew those well. She'd spent a lot of time in them. She hadn't spent time in her own grave before, at least not that she remembered. Still, there was a first time for everything. How often did people climb out of their own burial place, after all? Not often, she imagined. At least not for humans. And she was human, so gloriously human, standing there in the light.

Buffy smiled, and then started walking. She had no particular destination in mind. If she picked a direction and walked in it long enough, then she was bound to end up somewhere interesting. There had to be something out there. After so long underground, Buffy hungered for experience.

She found something faster than she had expected. A pair of demons, each carrying swords, apparently eager to set upon a little blonde wandering down the street all by herself. They paused when they saw the state of her clothes, and stopped outright when they saw her face. She was the Slayer, after all. Of course they would stop before her.

"Looks like there's another one." One of the demons remarked.

The other demon ran a critical eye over her. "Doesn't look like she's in as good a condition as the other one. Won't be nearly as much fun. What do you say to cutting her down right here?"

Oh, no. This wasn't right, wasn't right at all. Demons didn't just stand in front of her and talk so casually about her butchery as though she was a slice of meat that hadn't stopped walking yet. She was the Slayer. Right about now, they should be making a run for it before _she_ cut _them_ down.

They certainly shouldn't be raising their swords and looking as though they were about to be doing something distasteful.

"Stop."

Her voice shouldn't have carried. It was barely louder than a whisper, the merest remnant of a voice that hadn't spoken for a long time. But it did carry, and the demons did stop. They looked about as surprised as Buffy did by their reaction.

Buffy took a breath, and she was surprised to smell smoke on the air, as the wind carried the scent of burning wood and melting plastic and blood to her nose. She wondered why she hadn't smelt any of this before. The answer came almost before she had thought the question – of course, she hadn't taken a breath before.

But then there was a fuzziness in her brain, and Buffy forgot that this was the first breath that she had taken since waking up in the coffin. As far as she was concerned, she had been breathing all along.

"Stop." Buffy said again, and her voice was stronger this time. To her own surprise, as well as that of the demons, they showed no sign of being about to move.

And then the words poured out of her, as though there was a dam that had broken in her throat, a dam that had been holding back a torrent of words that had just been waiting to spill out. "You're scared. You're scared because all you know how to do is pillage and kill and burn your way across the continent, and you can't do that anymore. Even here, in Sunnydale, on the Hellmouth, you could only come here once I was dead and buried. Just one girl held off all of you, and I didn't even know you were there. I didn't know that you iexisted/i, and I still scared you away." A dim part at the back of her mind wonders at what she's saying, because she hasn't the faintest idea where the words are coming from but she knows for certain that they are true as she says them. "You were scared to come here because of me, and you can't go anywhere else because the world has grown up and left you behind. If you rode into another town and tried to take it like you're doing here, you'd be annihilated. The humans would wipe you out without a second thought."

One of the demons says "We're not scared of anything." But the silence that had existed before he gave his response had gone on just slightly too long for him to be even a little bit convincing.

"Of course you are." Buffy said, dismissing him so entirely that he might not even have been there for all the notice that she gave him. And then she looked at him, and smiled, and it was a smile with too many teeth in it and not nearly enough mirth. "And you should be. Because either you die here and now, or you run away. And if you run, you will watch as the world forgets you so entirely that you won't even be remembered as a tale to scare the children. No one will remember you, and you will just… waste away." Buffy took a step forward, and the demons took a step back. Her smile became gleeful, like a child that has discovered a long lost toy. "So what's it going to be? Will you die now, or die later?"

The demons look each other, and then at the dirty little woman with the bleeding hands who wasn't holding anything even close to a weapon.

It was not a fight. Not even close. The only word that fits is 'slaughter'. Because, unlike her, the demons had just been slabs of meat that hadn't stopped moving yet.

Buffy stood there, watching the blood pool on the ground. Both parts of her, the part that had been behind the outpouring of words and the part that had wondered where they were coming from, watched as it spread across the pavement. It was dark and thick, not like human blood at all.

The street lights twinkle above, reflected darkly in the blood as Buffy moved on, not even sparing another glance at the mangled corpses of the demons that had tried to take her town from her.


	2. Chapter 2

_Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight_

 _finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard_

 _of, while blasé princesses indict_

 _tilts at terror as downright absurd._

-Sylvia Plath

* * *

Buffy knew that she was in Sunnydale, but that was about it. She didn't really recognise where she was, even though the town was so small that she had doubtlessly walked down this street before. Perhaps it was the crashed cars that littered the road, taken for joyrides and then wrapped around lampposts when the drivers got bored. Maybe it was the buildings which smouldered as though someone had tried to set them on fire and then moved on to something more interesting. Maybe it was because she had spent an indeterminate length of time buried underground for no reason that she could remember.

Still, even if she didn't know where she was, Buffy still knew where she was going. It wasn't really all that hard to figure it out. The sound of motorbikes rumbled in the distance, a dull roar that didn't fit in with the sound of the town she remembered. Buffy knew, without knowing how she knew, that the demons that she had slaughtered were just the tip of the iceberg. Others had come and tried to burn her town to the ground, and they didn't even have the patience to do it properly.

And that wasn't right, that wasn't the way that it should be. There was no point to a land of dust and ashes. Besides, she was the Slayer, and she was meant to stop that kind of thing from happening.

So Buffy wandered on until she found herself in a wide open square, filled with demons. They were the same kind of demons that had accosted her earlier. Some of them were on motorbikes, while the rest were crowded together and cheering the others on as they drove in to attack some figure tied down in the middle of the square.

Buffy should have run, she knew. She couldn't fight this many. She wasn't strong enough to fight them all. She'd just crawled out of her own grave, and if she didn't want to go straight back there then she should leave the helpless person to their fate and get out of there as fast as she could.

Instead, she just said "Which one of you is the leader?"

Again, her voice shouldn't have carried. Not even the demons directly in front of her should have been able to hear her, not over their own raucous cries and the thunder of their bikes. But her voice did carry. It carried clear across the square as though she had spoken through a megaphone. Silence fell as the demons turned to face her, the ones on bikes dismounting and shutting down their engines.

"Well, well, well." A demon made his way through the crowd. He looked pretty much the same as the others, but he moved as though there wasn't even the slightest bit of doubt that, when he took a step forward, there wasn't going to be another demon standing in his way. And there wasn't. He walked as though he was the most powerful person there, and knew it. He moved towards Buffy, and the crowd moved around him. "What do we have here, boys? She doesn't look as realistic as that one." He gestured vaguely at the figure in the centre of the square. "Still, I'm sure we can find something to do with her."

Buffy had no weapon. Her hands were bleeding, and she was dirty and dishevelled. If she was ever going to strike fear into the hearts of a demon army, it certainly wasn't going to be now. Even so, she looked at the leader as though it was just the pair of them alone in the square, as though the rest of his gang wasn't there. Buffy might not be able to take on all of them, but this one? This one she could fight. "Run."

The leader looked disconcerted for the merest fraction of a second. In his experience, people didn't ignore a crowd of demons who would think nothing of tearing them to shreds. That was the kind of thing that drew someone's attention. But he rallied quickly. "Oh, no. You've got it all backwards. You're the one who should be running from us." He grinned at her. "If you're lucky, we'll even give you a head start."

Buffy tilted her head and looked at him as though she had heard what he was saying but couldn't quite understand. "Why? There isn't any need to run from things that don't scare me."

The leader stared at her incredulously, and then threw his head back and laughed. "Then you're even more broken than the other one, girly. We'll see if you get scared when we take you apart."

"Is anyone scared of you, anymore? When was the last time that you rode into town and felt the thrill of knowing that you were the scariest thing in it? People don't get scared of thugs any more. Haven't for centuries."

"Oh yeah?" The leader said, amused. "Funny. The people we… met earlier sure seemed plenty scared."

"Sure, they're scared now. They run now. But in the morning, when they see what's happened? Then they'll get angry, and there's a lot more of them than there are of you. You think the world is going to just stand by and let you wipe a town off the map? No. That kind of thing doesn't happen anymore. They'll stomp you out of existence and call it pest control, and then they'll just sit back and forget about it because that's what people do. People aren't going to waste time cowering from you, not when there's so much… _more_ out there that frightens them." Buffy made a gesture that seemed to take in everyone in the square. "But then you knew that already. This is your last hurrah."

The leader's eyes narrowed. "I said it before, girl. You've got it all backwards. We're the ones people are afraid of. And if anyone's going to be doing any stomping, it's going to be us."

Buffy spread her arms wide. "Come on then. Here I am. The Slayer, ready and waiting. Come on." She smiled at them as though they were friends she was inviting to dinner.

The leader grinned as though Buffy had told him a joke and hadn't realised it. "But you're not though, are you? The Slayer died. You're just another robot like that one over there. You're just a little damaged robot who hasn't even been programmed to run away."

Buffy shrugged, unconcerned. "If you choose to think so. Even so, here I am. I am inviting you to come and fight me. I can't kill you all. I can take maybe five of you before you overwhelm me. Does anyone want to volunteer to be one of those five? Come on now."

The demons looked restive. They'd come into Sunnydale and cut through anyone that stood in their way like a few dozen hot knives through a few dozen people. They knew that if anyone was going to be dying, it wasn't going to be them.

But then, maybe she actually was the Slayer. The blood on her hands certainly looked like human blood, unlike the stuff that came from the robot, which was more akin to battery fluid. And there was a reason that they'd never come to Sunnydale before. They knew that they were strong, but she was stronger. They knew that they were many, but they knew they would be less if they fought her. None of them wanted to be the first one to fight her, the first one to fall.

Buffy dropped her arms, turned on her heel and walked away. They were of no concern to her, now.

Then the leader snarled, ran at her, and died before he even knew what was going on. Buffy continued walking as though nothing had happened. The leader had died because he was afraid. Afraid of losing face, afraid of being the impotent leader of a species that was no longer viable. And the rest… well, they wouldn't fight her now. They were afraid too, afraid of dying. They could have killed her, but they were too afraid that they would be amongst the handful that she took down with her. They'd be clearing out of town as soon as they could, now.

She couldn't have fought that many. She wasn't strong enough. But that didn't matter. She didn't have to fight them when she had already beaten them with their own minds.

This was her town. If anyone was going to be running, then they would be running from _her_.


	3. Chapter 3

_Words that, against her will,_

 _swarmed within her,_

 _now fly around her, shrieking,_

 _while others that she still holds back,_

 _lurk in the caverns of her eyes,_

 _waiting for night._

-Rainer Maria Rilke

* * *

Buffy still didn't recognise where she was, not really. It was Sunnydale, she knew, and everything seemed familiar, but she couldn't quite seem to fit the street into her memory of the place. Everything seemed as though it was on the verge of being recognised, but nothing actually was.

That is, until she heard a voice. "You know, for demons who come riding into town at the most perfectly bad time possible in the history of everything, these guys sure seem in a hurry to leave again."

That was Xander speaking. She recognised the voice. He sounded… worried.

"Maybe the Buffybot scared them off?" Anya said hopefully. And then, in a voice that suggested that something unpleasant had occurred to her, she added "Or maybe something else did."

Before she could elaborate on that, though, Buffy came and stood in front of them.

They didn't recognise her, not to start with. At first, all they saw was a small, dirty woman with tangled hair. Then they actually looked at what they were seeing. They took in her face, her expression and her bleeding hands. They actually saw _her_.

Buffy had heard the expression about people looking like they had seen a ghost. They weren't looking at her like that, although after clawing her way out of her grave she wouldn't be surprised if they had. And that was it, really – they didn't look surprised, and Buffy didn't understand why they weren't. People didn't generally come erupting out of cemeteries, not unless they were vampires.

They didn't look surprised, but they did look… apprehensive, she supposed was the word. They looked as though she was something to be wary of, as though at any moment she might do something strange or dangerous.

It was only then, seeing that on their faces, that she realised that they had done something. People didn't spontaneously escape their own graves. There had to a reason, and that reason was staring her in the face with an anxious expression.

"What did you do?" Buffy asked curiously. It was a conversational tone, or at least she had intended it to be so. Judging by the way they flinched it certainly hadn't come across that way.

"We brought you back." Willow said defensively, as though resurrecting a fallen friend was something she had to defend. She looked confused afterwards, unsure as to why she took that tone. She settled on Buffy's tone and her appearance and the fact that obviously the spell hadn't quite worked out as she had planned, and she completely glossed over the fact that the spell was dangerous in the first place and that she had known that beforehand.

Buffy could see all that when she looked at her, and she felt something stirring in the back of her mind. A memory, perhaps, or a deeply-buried thought. That wasn't right. She hadn't been there to bring back. She hadn't gone anywhere that she _needed_ to be brought back. She had always been right here. She had never left.

Oh, why couldn't she remember why she been in that grave in the first place?

"H-how are you?" Tara asked, obviously afraid of what the answer was going to be.

The question was so mundane that Buffy didn't have even the slightest idea of how to answer it. She'd been buried in a coffin, and now here she was, and people were asking her how she was doing? Did she lie and say that she was fine, or lie and say that she wasn't, or tell the truth and say that not only did she not have even the slightest idea how she was, but that she didn't even know how she could find out. She could tell that if she said the wrong thing, these people, her friends would just burst apart. With the demons, she had managed to find their insecurities and twist in such a way that they had fallen apart and become impotent, fearful shades of what they had once been. If she said the wrong thing here, then she could take these people apart just as easily.

So Buffy fought down the urge to say something, and just stood there silently. They stared at her. She stared at them. None of them seemed willing to make the first move.

"We should get you home." Tara said eventually. "It l-looks like your hands might need bandaging."

Right. That was innocuous enough. Buffy could expand on that. Buffy held up her hands and looked at them as though they might tell her how to proceed in this situation. "You're probably right."

They walked home, and the silence was deep and overwhelmingly awkward. Buffy dimly recognised the street they were on, but it wasn't until she actually saw her house, where she had been spending at least part of every night for the past few years, that she finally, fully recognised anything. This was her home, and she wasn't going to leave it again. Not for anything.

And there was Dawn in the doorway, calling out. She was glad that they were all okay, and she skimmed over Buffy as though she didn't even notice that she was really there, as though she couldn't bring herself to see her. She thought that she was the robot, Buffy realised, the robot who had looked like her. The one that the demons had been tormenting in the square.

"Hello, Dawn." Buffy said simply.

Dawn stopped talking as suddenly as if she had gone mute, and her eyes were drawn to Buffy as if by magnets. She still didn't look at Buffy as though she was seeing a ghost, though. Her eyes were wide, and she was looking at Buffy as though she couldn't take her eyes off of her but also couldn't believe what she was seeing, because dead people didn't come back to life and say hello, that kind of thing didn't happen.

Buffy stood and watched as the world that Dawn had been living in since… since whenever Buffy had died came crashing down around her ears and all she could think about was that her friends hadn't told Dawn what they were doing. Obviously, there had been a big chance that something would go wrong, and they hadn't wanted Dawn to get her hopes up. Willow hadn't wanted that for the others, either, not if her reaction earlier had been anything to go by.

But something hadn't gone wrong. Here she was, and she was free. She wasn't stuck underground. She was here, breathing the free air, exactly as she was supposed to.

"How?" Dawn said, and it was clear that that was the only syllable she felt able to say. She said it again.

"We brought her back, Dawnie." Willow said, and this time her voice was nothing but satisfied. She had reunited them. Why wouldn't she proud of that?

"Are you okay?" Dawn asked.

There was that question again. Once again Dawn looked like she didn't really want Buffy to answer, not if it wasn't the right kind of reply. Once again, Buffy didn't know what the right reply would be.

So she avoided the question. "What happened?" Buffy asked. "What… before, before I… was buried. What happened then? I don't remember."

"You died."

"No." The response came instantly, almost before Dawn had finished. Buffy could feel something, some torrent of words bottled up in her throat and she knew that if she started speaking she would wash them all away, so she limited herself with saying "No, that didn't happen."

"It did. You, you… died, Buffy. You died." Dawn said, looking at her sister to see how she took this news.

Buffy, for her part, didn't trust herself to speak. She hadn't died. That didn't make sense. She was the Slayer. She didn't die. She just…

And then the fuzziness fell over her thoughts like a blanket, and her throat took over. "I remember the fall."

"Yes." Dawn said gently, and for her there is no one else there, just as there wasn't on the tower that night. There is only her and her sister. "Yes, that's right. You jumped. You jumped to save me."

"No, that's not the way it happened." Buffy said, and the words are pouring out now and there is no chance whatsoever that she will be able to stop them. She doesn't even know what she's going to say before she speaks. "I didn't jump. I was cast down. There was no choice in the matter. I was pushed. How could - I would never jump." Dawn looked like she wanted to speak, but Buffy wasn't going to give her a chance, not now. "I would never jump. There is only the fall, the sensation of…" Buffy trailed off, uncertain. How could she express something when she didn't have even the slightest idea what it was that she was trying to express. Her voice was running things, now, and didn't seem to be taking any instructions from her brain. "I would not jump for you."

And Buffy moved past the figure who clung to the doorway as though it is the only thing that could stop her from being swept away. Buffy moved past her, and she was utterly uninterested in the mess that she has left behind. There was more, so much more that is just waiting to be said, but now is not the time.


	4. Chapter 4

_Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with._

-Nicolo Machiavelli

* * *

Words.

That was what it came down to, in the end. Words. Words spoken in her voice, by her mouth, expelled by her breath, but they weren't her words. They were the words that seemed to bypass her brain and take direct control of her tongue. Buffy had always been ready with a quip, a ready pun in the face of danger. But she couldn't drive away a whole demon gang just by speaking. She couldn't just look at someone and know exactly what to say to take them down. That wasn't her.

Or at least it hadn't been.

And again, speaking to Dawn, it had seemed as though the words she had spoken had been carefully chosen to be as hurtful as possible, but they hadn't been. Buffy had even tried to keep quiet, in case the words just bubbled up inside her and spilled over. But when Dawn had said that she had jumped… she had had a visceral, unthinking response to that. She hadn't jumped. That felt like entirely the wrong word.

But the thing was she _had_ jumped. She remembered standing there and taking the plunge. She couldn't understand why thinking that she had jumped just felt so wrong to her. It must have something to do with the voice, but-

And then something in her mind switched off certain parts of her brain, and she slept and did not dream. When she awoke, she remembered nothing of what she had been thinking before she had gone to sleep.

When Buffy went downstairs, all of her friends were there. Only Dawn was absent, and Buffy knew that she wouldn't be seeing her anytime soon. Her sister had a remarkable capability to ignore someone out of existence.

Her friends weren't looking at her reproachfully, because she had been dead this time yesterday and it was almost impossible to be reproachful towards someone in that situation. But she got the feeling that, if things were otherwise, there would be whole heaps of reproach coming her way. As it was, they were looking at her warily as though they were wondering what she was going to say to them. Perhaps they thought that their spell hadn't been quite as successful as they had thought it was.

But, when one of them spoke, it was just Anya. She told Buffy that she had a leak in the cellar.

Buffy looked at her, nonplussed. Is that what people did? She had been dead less than twenty-four hours ago, and now she was being bothered by needless technicalities that she didn't doubt they could have dealt with themselves. Why did they feel the need to tell her that the moment she woke up? "Call a plumber then."

Xander cleared his throat and looked away. "Um, about that…"

"You've got no money." Anya said bluntly.

"Okay." Buffy said, wondering how she could possibly have managed to lose money while being dead. "How much money do I have?"

"Kind of… none." Willow said.

"Less than none." Anya added.

"Well, I guess I'd better go to the bank, then. See if I can get a loan." And Buffy left. She didn't stop to get breakfast – it didn't occur to her that she should.

Her friends watched her go. After a while, Xander said "Well, she took that well."

"Kind of too well." Willow said.

* * *

"Hello, I'd like to see the manager."

The receptionist at the bank looked at her computer and said "I'm sorry, he's in a meeting at the moment. If you wouldn't mind waiting, perhaps he could see you after he's done."

"That's okay." Buffy said. "I can wait." She took a seat.

Then she started to wonder why she was there. Buffy wasn't entirely sure how long she had been dead, but even if it had been long enough for her to somehow lose all the money her mom had left her and spend all the insurance money, she still wondered why none of her friends had done anything about it. Willow and Tara were even living in her house now, and they hadn't done anything to sort things out. If she had stayed dead, she wondered what they would have done. Something, she hoped, eventually. Or maybe they just would have clung to the idea that they could bring her back and she would deal with everything, because she was the Slayer and that was what she did.

And just like that, Buffy lost her patience. She got up and walked down the hall, ignoring the rather feeble cries from the receptionist telling her that she wasn't allowed back there. She found a door bearing the enigmatic emblem of 'Mr Wells', and she knew instinctively that what she was looking for was behind that door. Ignoring the receptionist, who was now saying that she was going to call security, she opened it.

There were two people in there. One was a little, mousy man in an expensive suit which he wore badly. The other was tall, and looked not only like a rich person but the kind of rich person who knew exactly what money could buy, and the price that everything could be bought for.

Buffy turned to the little man and said "Get out." Purely by coincidence, the light above her blew when she spoke.

The little man turned to the other man, Wells, who nodded. The little man scurried out, taking care to stay as far away from Buffy as he possibly could.

"Please, take a seat." Wells gestured at the chair the other man had just vacated. "What can I do for you, Miss… ?"

"Summers. I need money."

Wells smiled faintly. "There are more orthodox ways to arrange a loan, Miss Summers."

"I didn't say that I wanted a loan. I said I wanted money."

"This is a bank. We're not in the habit of just handing money out."

Buffy tilted her head. "Of course you are. You were just about to bribe that man so that he wouldn't publish anything about that demon gang in his newspaper."

Wells blinked and leaned back in his chair. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Now, see, the Mayor was a politician through and through, but I think that even he had his work cut out keeping all the various demon factions from wrecking the town too badly. At least, until he had a chance to do some wrecking himself. So I don't think that he had the time to keep the newspapers quiet, to stop any news programme from covering any of the weird stuff that goes on in this town. I don't think he would have bothered to cover up all the deaths in this town, so that people still move in, attracted by those lovely low property prices which I am absolutely certain you arranged." Buffy leaned forward. "The Mayor's been dead for years now, and we haven't elected another one. I wonder how it is that the town keeps on running, Mr Wells?"

Wells looked at her calmly, as though he was regularly accused of bribery, price fixing and wholesale corruption. "Even if what you're saying is true, why would that mean that I give you money? After all, you own no news outlet. You are not a business owner. In fact, Miss Summers, you don't even have a job. You are precisely _not_ the sort of person that I would bribe. If, of course, I was the kind of person to do such a thing."

"It must have been a lucrative job, being the Mayor's money man." Buffy smiled, and it was the kind of smile that would not have looked out of place on a shark that has scented blood in the water. "I'm the Slayer, Mr Wells, but then you knew that already. All I have to do is go into a demon bar and say that anyone who makes your business a target is immune from my… duties, and they'll be falling over themselves to take you down. They'll burn your properties. It's hard to keep people bribed when demons are holding their families hostage. Maybe some enterprising demon will even track down a witch to put a curse of your stock folio. Just how long do you think that it will be before you are ruined, Mr Wells?"

Wells didn't speak. He seemed to be waiting for Buffy to say something, which wasn't good because she didn't have even the slightest idea what to say next. The mouth had taken over the moment she had seen Wells. She had known exactly what to say, or at least her voice had. She hadn't had a clue what she was going to say between one second and the next.

Eventually Wells sighed. "How much?"

While Buffy wondered exactly how much she could ask for, her lips curled into a smile and framed the words "I'm sorry, were you under the impression that this was going to be a one-off payment? I want access to your accounts, Mr Wells. After all, I do a public service. I'm sure you wouldn't like to see what would happen should I stop. The events yesterday would just be a taste of what would come."

Wells sighed again. "Very well. It will be done."

Without another word, Buffy stood to leave. Before she could go, however, Wells said "I was under the impression that you would rather be… what was it again? Oh yes. _Class Protector_. Defender of the Small. It is so refreshing to see that you've grown up. I look forward to following your career, Slayer."


	5. Chapter 5

_To have a great man for an intimate friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it; those who have, fear it._

-Homer

* * *

Buffy had never blackmailed anyone before. She wasn't entirely sure that she had done the right thing. Oh, sure, she was now financially secure and, since she had dropped out of college before she'd died, she wasn't going to have to rush out and find some menial job to pay the bills. She and Dawn weren't going to have their house repossessed. So there was that.

But Wells wasn't the kind of man who would take being blackmailed well. He was the sort of person who would much rather be doing the blackmailing - in fact, Buffy didn't doubt that if his bribes ever failed he would gladly resort to blackmail to achieve his ends. That, or even more drastic action. One didn't become the de facto ruler of a town like Sunnydale without being more than a little ruthless.

Then again, Buffy hadn't actually blackmailed him. Not technically. She hadn't been holding any information over his head to assure his compliance. She had just out and out threatened him, and _that_ she had done before. She wasn't above threatening someone to achieve her ends, if it was necessary. She had done exactly that to Spike any number of times, and it had helped her save the world. Threatening someone wasn't always a bad idea. But she'd never done it for personal gain before, not like that.

But why shouldn't she, really? The Council had flat out refused to support her. She had no job, and no real prospects of being able to hold one down anyway, not with her Slaying. None of her friends were earning nearly enough to support her. And she was doing good things. She'd even pointed out as much to Wells. She was performing a public service, and she'd seen what had happened once she'd stopped, once the demons had stopped being fooled by the Buffybot. The demonic biker gang would have been just the start.

So, even though Buffy hadn't gone into the bank with anything even remotely approaching an intention to threaten the manager into giving her direct access to his ill-gotten gains, the fact remained that it hadn't actually been bad. Even if her voice had taken over again, shunting her brain to one side and taking direct control of the conversation.

No, maybe threatening someone wasn't bad. Not if it allowed her to continue what she was doing.

Buffy had walked aimlessly since she had left the bank. Even though this was here town and these were her streets, she still didn't fully recognise where she was. She knew she'd seen it before, patrolled down it, but she couldn't quite seem to fit it into her memory of the town. She couldn't quite envisage how it all came together to become a coherent map that would allow her to walk from one side to the other without losing her bearings.

But she'd get there. Soon she wouldn't feel so lost.

She continued on, now intending to find her way to Spike's crypt. She hadn't seen him since she had died, and she suspected that no one else would have told him that she was alive. If nothing else, he could tell her how long she had been dead for.

But instead she found herself outside her house again. Buffy frowned, not quite sure how she had wound up there. She was sure she had taken the right path to the cemetery.

And then a cloud came down over her thoughts, and she forgot entirely that she had had thought about going to see Spike. She forgot that she had any intention whatsoever of seeing him. If, at that moment, someone had asked her if she was going to see Spike, she would have looked at them as though they were spouting nonsense and asked why she would possibly want to do a thing like that.

So she went inside. Xander and Anya had gone, presumably to their respective jobs. Dawn was probably at school, if she wasn't playing truant. But Willow and Tara were there, watching TV and trying to look as though they hadn't blown off their classes solely to see how their newly resurrected friend was doing. "How did it go? At the bank, I mean. Did they give you a loan? I noticed that you didn't bring any paperwork with you. Maybe you… so, how did it go?" Willow said, forcing herself to stop when it became clear that neither Tara nor Buffy were going to interrupt her.

Buffy smiled, and it was friendly smile, one that she had given to Willow hundreds of times. Willow smiled back, relieved that the person who had not only refused to accept that she had jumped to save her sister but refused to acknowledge that she would ever do that at all had made way for the Buffy that she knew. "Hey, Will, what do you think of me paying for your tuition?"

Willow blinked. She would be the first to admit that she wasn't particularly experienced in the world of banks and finance, but she doubted that they would hand out such large loans to someone who didn't have a job or any immediate chance of having one. But then, this was Sunnydale, and what did she know about it anyway? "Uh, no, that's nice but no, I'm okay."

And then Buffy's smile changed. It still looked like a smile. All the component parts were there, and if they were put together then they would make something that could only be called a smile. But it wasn't friendly anymore. Not even close. "Why not? You're living in my house. These bills that have been building up while I was dead, they are your bills. You're sleeping in my mother's bedroom. Why shouldn't you take my money? You've already helped yourself to my house."

"T-that's going too far." Tara said softly.

Buffy tiled her head and looked at her as though she genuinely couldn't understand why Tara would say that. "No, it isn't. I've been dead for… who knows how long, and the first thing that happened when I woke up this morning was me being told that not only is my house leaking but that I don't have the money to fix it. You've been living here for who knows how long, and the first thing that you do when I come back is burden me with such petty problems that you could surely have dealt with them yourselves. I am not here to solve everything for you. That is not what I'm here for. I am not some crutch for you to lean on."

"We never said that, Buffy." Willow said. She looked tense, as though at any moment she might just turn and make a run for it. "It was just Anya. You know how she is. She's hardly the soul of tact at the best of times, and-"

"I do know how she is, Willow. I also know how you are. I know that you were a little mouse of a girl when I first came to Sunnydale, so nervous that you couldn't even speak up in class. You were terrified of your own shadow, and if Cordelia had frightened you any more she would have given you panic attacks. And then I arrived, and you found out that the world was much, much scarier than you had ever known, and you clung to me like a tiny child to its mother. You might have grown up now, you might be some powerful, confident witch now, but you still treat me as though I am your mother. Maybe it's because your own mother barely even registered your existence. I don't really care. But you think I will step in and solve everything, because that is what mothers do, right? So that's what I'm doing, Willow. I'm solving everything, because you certainly haven't."

"Buffy, this isn't you."

Buffy's hands tightened, seemingly of their own accord, until they were clenched so tightly that she could hear her tendons creak. The image on the TV dissolved into a swirl of static that hissed rhythmically through the speakers. "Oh, this is me, Willow. This is me."

Whatever might have been said next was interrupted by someone knocking on the front door.

"I think you'd better leave." Buffy said softly. It was a suggestion, nothing more than that, but even though Willow didn't have any intention to leave, had in fact planned on staying and talking to Buffy, that wasn't what she actually did. She and Tara found themselves leaving before they even had the chance to think about what they were doing. It wasn't hypnosis. It was more like Buffy's voice had bypassed the more advanced, conscious part of their brains and spoken directly to the part of them that, when faced with a threat, would run and run until they had run so far that the threat was so far behind them that it could never catch up.

So Willow and Tara left, and Buffy walked to her front door. She wasn't unduly surprised to find Wells there, some paperwork tucked under his arm. She imagined that now was the point where Wells put some kind of counter pressure on her, because he was that kind of man. Men like him couldn't let go of control for even a second.

"I've brought you some paperwork." Wells said, as though he was commenting on the weather rather than looking around the house with a proprietary eye, as though all of this and much, much more was actually his, even if Buffy didn't know it yet.

"So I see." Buffy replied. She made no motion to invite him inside, but neither did she stop him when he did.

"I also have some other… business for you. Now that you're active in that area, that is."

Buffy tilted her head. "What is it that you want, Mr Wells? Do you want me to kill someone for you? Is that it?"

She realised that it wasn't, as soon as she said it. Truthfully, she hadn't really thought that he would, but then without her voice taking over and running things she felt as though she was just treading water, waiting for Wells to realise that she wasn't nearly as threatening as he thought. "No. Although I'm intrigued that… in any case, no, that's not why I'm here. Just after you left, my bank was robbed. By a demon."

And now they were at the crux of the matter. Buffy was supposed to track down this demon, find out why it had decided to attack a bank in broad daylight, find out what it was after and if it was working for anyone. That was her job, after all. She was supposed to fight the forces of darkness. And if Wells could reassure everyone he… worked with that any threats to his business would be dealt with swiftly and without mercy by no one less than the Slayer, then so much the better for him.

"It wasn't me." Buffy said simply. She knew that she threatened Wells with exactly this kind of thing, and she even thought that she would have followed through is necessary – but it hadn't been necessary.

"I didn't think that it was. I just want it dealt with, as quickly as possible. And this is exactly your area of expertise, after all." Wells leant forward, his eyes gleaming. This was the moment that he lived for, when he held all the power and he was just getting ready to let his opponent know that they had lost before they even knew that they were playing. "If, however, you don't feel inclined to… carry out your public service, might I remind you that you are not the only person who can make threats. You are not the only one who can ruin someone. I own this town, Slayer. With a phone call, I can have this house repossessed. I can have your friends homeless in an hour. I could have every place in this entire town close their doors in your friends' faces when they see them coming. I can have them arrested for some trumped up charge and held until they are old. This is my town, Slayer, and if you're going to step up to my level then you're going to see how _I_ do things around here."

Buffy's first response is to be anxious and stressed. They were her friends. She didn't want them ruined, not because of her, not because her voice had run away and gotten her into trouble.

But her second response drowned that out entirely, washing it away so completely that there is not even the slightest remnant of the first emotion in her. She was completely swamped by apathy. Why should she care? She had been carrying her friends ever since she had met them. She was the Slayer, and they were just the little people who clung to her coattails. So what if they were ruined? It was no more than she had been, when she had returned from the dead to find that she was utterly broke and on the verge of losing her house, and she'd come back from that.

But stopping this town from being overrun by the forces of evil was her job, and she was going to do it.

"Fine." Buffy said, carefully calculating her response so that it sounded as though she was admitting defeat. "I'll do it."

"Of course you will." Wells patted the paperwork. "Well, I'll leave this with you."

After Wells left, Buffy didn't have even the slightest desire to look at the paperwork. Instead, she wanted to get up and find out what this demon was up to, why it was suddenly acting in an oddly non-demonic way. Willy's would be a good place to start. If anyone was going to find a demon for a bank heist, that was where they would start.

So Buffy didn't understand why, a few minutes later, she was standing outside the door to the Sunnydale Gazette. She had been planning on going to Willy's, she was sure she had gone the right way there, and this place wasn't even close. It was in the opposite direction, in fact.

And then an idea dropped into Buffy's head. It was so complete and fully formed that it seemed as though someone else had come up with it and just placed it there, ready for her.

It was, she knew, a dangerous idea. More than dangerous, in fact. But it was audacious, and brilliant, and it was her feet and no one else's that walked her into the building and into the editor's room, where she sat across from the mousy man in the expensive suit that she had met earlier. It was her voice and no one else's that said "I have a story that you are going to run."

And the mousy man looked at her, the woman who had gone so confidently into Wells' office and was now here, giving him orders, and he didn't even think of turning her down.


	6. Chapter 6

_It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality._

-Virginia Woolf

* * *

The Sunnydale Press was not a respected publication. It was not just that the quality of writing was poor, although it was. It was hard to have a good newspaper when the news was quashed. Oh, certain things were still reported, things which not even the town of Sunnydale could refuse to see. Things like the destruction of the school or the rise of MOO, which were simply too widespread to avoid reporting. But then such things were never, ever mentioned again, and if anyone had ever bothered to go trawling through records they would have found that, by and large, old newspapers dealing with such things had been removed from existence. And then, the death-by-barbeque-fork that seemed endemic in Sunnydale wasn't dealt with at all, and not one mention was given to gangs on PCP. Most of what happened was swept under the rug, and even if the citizens of Sunnydale were perfectly happy to ignore things that happened which didn't fit in with their accepted definition of reality, they were less than happy for their newspaper to do the same.

It was hardly surprising, then, that the quality of journalism wasn't high. Anyone who had even a modicum of journalistic integrity would have gotten out of town as soon as they could. Those who didn't had their stories more or less dictated to them by people like Wells or the Mayor.

As such, the story that Buffy had published in the Sunnydale Press wasn't held in terribly high esteem.

However, the news segment she did most certainly was.

Buffy hadn't really ever made a speech before. Oh, she was perfectly capable of giving a pep talk, she'd been giving those since Sunnydale, but even when she had had to rally her class to help bring down the Mayor she hadn't really had to say more than "Monsters are out there, it's not enough just to not go out after dark or avoid certain areas. You have to fight." Even by Sunnydale standards, the people at her school had been aware that strange things were going on. It was hard not to be when the Hellmouth was right under the library.

But she didn't think that the citizens of Sunnydale, who had survived a lifetime of looking the other way, would be so easy to convince.

So she pressured the local newscaster into getting a spot on the next broadcast.

Not a lot of people watched it, the first time around. Like the Press, the news wasn't held in high regard. But enough did, and they told their friends, who in turn told their friends. The segment spread like wildfire.

"Hello, people of Sunnydale. Some of you might recognise me. Perhaps I pushed you away from something with a face like something out of a nightmare. Maybe I saved you from some hideous, scaly thing and told you to run. Or maybe you don't know me at all, because you're sensible and you know that, even though no one talks about it, this isn't the kind of place where people go wandering around after dark."

Buffy paused for the briefest of seconds. Even though this had been her idea, that this speech was her brainchild and that it had been her and her alone who had made it happen, her voice had taken over again. This was its show. But then, she was okay with that. She was just a girl who had died twice before she was twenty-one. She couldn't rally an entire town.

But still, even though her face looked calm and her voice was strong, she couldn't help but feel nervous. Underneath the table, where the camera couldn't see, her hands were always moving, fidgeting, fingers twisting together and coming apart and randomly tracing on her thighs. She couldn't have kept still if she'd tried, not with that much nervous energy coursing through her.

But that meant nothing to her voice. "But it is time that someone talked about it, don't you think? Isn't it time to mention all the disappearances, the strange amounts of deaths attributed accidents with barbeque forks, those strange creatures that you sometimes see but don't really believe? Because they are out there, the monsters. You've probably heard of them, been told stories when you were growing up. But who really believes in demons these days? They're just metaphors, right? They're not real, solid, tangible things that will rip your throat out if you happen to be walking down the wrong street at the wrong time, are they?"

"You might think that they can't possibly be real. And you would be wrong. Dead wrong, most likely. They are out there. In fact, not even that. They are _here_. This is their town, and we just happen to be living in it. More strange stuff happens here than anywhere else in the world, the mortality rate here is the highest in the country, and not once do we wonder why. We are encouraged not to wonder why, because once we do we will find the answer staring at us in the face. Demons are real, and they hunt us like cattle. We aren't killed by accidents with barbeque forks, but by vampires. Not romantic, brooding vampires, but fiends with the faces of monsters. The evidence is right there, and we just refuse to see it."

"But I have had enough of that. I have fought these monsters for years now. Perhaps you are looking at me now, trying to guess my age and working backwards. Perhaps you don't believe that a girl my age could have fought these things for years. But I have, and I have won. But I have lost, too. I have lost people. I have lost my life, and not just metaphorically. I have fought, and fought, and I am tired. They do not stop, they do not end. I have saved this town, this country, this _world_ more times than I can count. But still they keep coming, and I cannot fight them all. I cannot be everywhere at once. I am only human."

"I am only human. But if you lend me the strength of your arms and the courage in your hearts, then we can take this town. We can take it back, for humankind. And these demons, these creatures, can be driven back into the fairy tale stories which, really, is where they belong. This can be our city, if we fight for it. We can drive them out. We can take them down."

"I have can't fight them all. I'm not strong enough. But together? Together we are strong. Together we can fight. Together, we can crush them."

"So the question is; are you ready to be strong?"

After they watched the segment, people talked about how clear she had been, about how she had made it seem so obvious what was going on, that they had to fight back. They did not talk about how scared they were to find that not only were they being called to arms but that they were already living in a warzone.

They did not talk about her voice, which sounded as though it had been speaking directly to the oldest part of their brain. The part that would run when threatened, and upon finding that running wasn't an option would turn and strike and strike and strike until either the threat was eliminated or there was no chance that they could strike any more.

But they didn't talk about that, or their fears, or their rage that the town they'd lived in all their lives wasn't theirs. They didn't talk about that. They only talked about how it was time to rise up and take a stand. They only talked about how it was time to strike, strike, strike.

But the demons saw it too. And unlike the humans, who only knew Buffy as a blonde blur in the darkness if they knew her at all, they knew exactly who she was and what she was capable of. They knew how many she had killed during all her years here. How many plans she had thwarted. And that was just her and her friends. What could she do with an army?

That morning, they had known that they could walk anywhere into the city, kill anyone they wanted and leave with only the Slayer to stop them. But suddenly everyone knew they were there – and not only that, but they wanted them gone. They wanted them _dead_.

Suddenly they were facing extinction. They had to strike now, while they were strong.

* * *

"What the hell was that?" Xander yelled angrily.

Buffy looked at him. She genuinely couldn't tell what he was so upset about. "What?"

"You know exactly what. You just told the whole town what. And now they're going to get themselves killed. No, scratch that. You just got them killed. Untrained people fighting demons? Tell me Buffy, how is that a good idea? People are going to _die_."

Buffy shrugged. "They're doing that now. They're doing it droves. They're dying every night. This way, they fight. They drive back the darkness. This way it accomplishes something."

"Are you even hearing yourself? You're signing people up to get slaughtered. You think that your average guy is going to take down even one demon? You didn't even tell them how to kill a vampire, for crying out loud."

"I'll teach them." Buffy said simply. "This is my job, Xander. Save the humans and stop the demons. But if I do it alone, Xander, I die. I hid the truth of what she was from Dawn, when I could have gotten her away, kept her safe if she'd known the truth. I can keep these people safe, too, if they know what's happening. Or safer, at least."

"Safer? You-"

"But then, you know something about keeping secrets, don't you Xander? That lie? Do you ever wonder what would have happened had you not lied to the girl you loved, if you hadn't tried to get her to kill the man she loved? Did you? Did you think about what would have happened if you told her, afterwards, that you had lied? Do you think that I would have forgiven you, after I sent the man I loved to hell? Well, Xander, it's not a secret. I wouldn't have."

Xander stood there gawping, when Anya, who had been keeping uncharacteristically quiet, said "Um, guys? I think you might want to look out of the window."

Buffy moved to window. Xander did not. He seemed to be rooted in place, as his mind worked through what Buffy had just said.

Buffy, meanwhile, completely forgot that he was there.

Because standing outside her house, filling her street, were an uncountable number of pale figures in black robes with rune-like scars where their eyes should be.

And Buffy watched as the Harbingers of Death, servants of the First Evil, went down on their knees and placed their foreheads on the ground in the most abject display of devotion of which they were capable.


	7. Chapter 7

_Farewel Remorse: all Good to me is lost;_

 _Evil be thou my Good; by thee at least_

 _Divided Empire with Heav'ns King I hold_

-John Milton

* * *

Silence.

It wasn't just that the masses of Bringers were silent. It wasn't just that her friends were waiting for her to say something, leaving a silence they were obviously expecting her to fill. It wasn't just that there was no wind outside, as though the entire universe had gone still as it waited for her to act.

Even her mind was silent. There were no words that bubbled up and rushed out past her lips before her brain had a chance to process them. There were no strange thoughts that appeared fully formed as though she had been struck by some kind of divine inspiration. There was nothing but silence. And the silence was waiting for her to fill it, waiting almost eagerly for her response.

"They're Bringers." Buffy said eventually. She knew that her friends hadn't actually seen them, at least not outside of ancient drawings. That had been years ago, anyway. "Servants of the First Evil." It wasn't enough, she knew, to name them. Naming got her nowhere. Naming wasn't a substitute for action.

"They sure seem keen on you." Anya muttered, and the unspoken addendum was deafening.

Nothing. Nothing but silence. No words leapt from her lips to her defence. Here, with her friends at her back and her enemies bowing before her, she was alone as she had been in her own coffin. If she was going to speak, if she was going to _act_ , then it would be her doing it. No one else was going to jump to her aid.

"Am I not evil?" Buffy said in response to Anya's unspoken question. "To vampires, to demons… to the things that live in the dark, am I not evil?" The words came slowly, but they were her words. They didn't come from someone else, somewhere else. They were hers and no one else's. "I am the thing that they tell horror stories about. The Slayer. The killer of their kind. How many of them have I killed? How many were killed by those who came before me? Even the merest fact of my existence was enough to keep the demon gang out of town. Demons run from me just because I am there. And now I threaten their very existence. I am raising this town against them. I want them extinct. Am I not evil? Am I not the greatest evil that they know?"

Anya looked at her, mouth open as though she was about to speak, but then she blinked and looked away. She can't deny that, during her time as a demon, she had felt a certain thrill when she came into contact with Slayers. Not just because messing with them was something of an accomplishment, but because they were dangerous. There a few things that scare a thousand year old demon, but a Slayer was one of them.

"Kill them." Buffy said simply. "To them, I am an evil above and beyond the First. I am the killer in the night. Should they not bow before such evil, those who vaunt themselves as servants of… the Big Bad?"

And she grabs a sword and goes outside.

It isn't killing, not really. They don't move, even as she walks among them, sword rising and falling over and over again. They could stand and overwhelm her in seconds, but instead they just die without a sound. It isn't killing. It's just slaughter.

"Er, excuse me?"

Buffy looked up. Standing in front of her is a slightly overweight man who she dimly recognised as owning the house opposite hers. The second most interesting thing about him is that behind him, peering through the windows, Buffy can see his wife and his daughter. She looks perhaps fifteen. The same age as she was when she was called. She looks nauseous – they all do – but they aren't looking away.

But the most interesting thing about the man is that he is carrying a shotgun. It looks old, and to Buffy's inexpert eye like it has never been used. He's carrying it as though he's afraid it might go off, but he is carrying it.

"We heard… um, we heard what you said. On the TV. That it's time to do something about this town. And, so, um…" he trails off, uncertain how to continue.

Buffy looks at this man who has probably never hurt anyone in his life who is never the less entirely willing to take up arms and kill demons just because she said so, and she smiles. "Are you sure you can?"

"Honestly? No. But these… things? They're not human. They're not right. They need to be stopped."

Buffy gestures at the Bringer in front of her. "Then stop them."

The shot rang loud, but Buffy wasn't watching. She was watching his daughter, who gasped and covered her mouth. Even so, she doesn't look away. She didn't looking away, and now this moment is going to be branded in her mind for the rest of her life – the day her father killed someone. She didn't look away, and now every time she closes her eyes, this is what she's going to see.

Buffy wasn't looking at the man as he lets out an involuntary sob, or when the gun drops from nerveless fingers. She was just looking at the girl, and then she smiled.

* * *

Later, when Buffy walked into the studio, everyone froze. One of the things about a small town is that news travels fast. At least, it does when people aren't purposefully turning a blind eye. In any case, it's these people's business to know what happens in Sunnydale. So of course they know.

They don't look at her as though they are star-struck fans meeting their favourite celebrity. They're looking at her as though she's some kind of war veteran, and they don't know how to react to that.

So they made themselves scarce. They find menial jobs, or whatever they can that will require them not to be in the same room as her. The exception is two people who look like engineers of some sort, who obviously don't feel they can justify walking away from whatever they're doing to a camera.

One of them said, in a too bright voice, "What did you think of that static?"

The other one looks at him with a mixture of gratitude and confusion. "What? It's static. What am I meant to think of it?"

"You didn't think it sounded kind of… creepy?"

"It's static. It sounded like static. What else would it sound like?"

The engineer shrugged. "Dunno. Just wondering."

Buffy ignored them and walked into the room where her address had been recorded. She was slightly surprised to find that it's ready for her, and that there's even a cameraman. He looks at her nervously, as though to say "I might not be able to kill monsters, but I can do this. I can help."

It's not enough, she knows, not nearly enough for people to stand on the side-lines and facilitate. But it's a start.

"I don't have much to say today." Buffy said, and although she's nominally speaking to the camera she feels as though the entire citizenry of Sunnydale is standing in front of her to listen to her speak. "You've probably already heard what happened."

She doesn't sound as eloquent as before. The voice isn't speaking. It's just her. But she doesn't need it. Not right now. All she has to do is play this right, and the town is hers. "It's not the first time that something like that has happened. You probably remember the day when we lost our voices and weird floating men came and cut out people's hearts. You probably saw them. You saw them and dozens like them, over the years. You saw them and blotted them out."

Buffy paused. Right now, everyone watching this would feel guilty, as though they'd let the town down. As though every eldritch creature that stalked Sunnydale's streets was thanks to them and their wilful blindness. "But today, for the first time, someone didn't turn his back. He fought. He was scared, terrified out of his mind, but he fought. He made a difference. I don't even know his name, but I'm proud. Proud to know that this city cares enough to fight. Proud that one man wanted to make a difference."

And now, that man, who only hours earlier had been crying over the blood on his hands, would feel proud too. Proud to be a killer. Because she had made him that, with a handful of words.

Is this what it feels like, to be a God?

"But we need more. More who are willing to make a difference." Buffy stood and smiled and spread her arms wide. "Come. Join me. We can make this town… better."


	8. Chapter 8

_We are not now that strength which in old days_

 _Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are_

-Lord Alfred Tennyson

* * *

When Buffy left the recording studio, she wasn't unduly surprised to find that no one was there. Given the speed at which they had all vanished when she had walked in, they obviously wouldn't have been in a hurry to come back. Not while she was there.

Except there was someone there. Oh, not someone who worked there. But Wells was waiting patiently for her, as though there was no doubt whatsoever in his mind that she would stop and talk to him.

On that front, he was entirely correct. Buffy walked over and stood in front of him, waiting calmly for him to speak.

Which, apparently, wasn't the response that Wells was looking for, going by his expression and the way that he snapped "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

Buffy didn't reply. She just stood there, staring at him placidly.

"I told you to find the demon that robbed my bank. I told you to make an example of him. I didn't tell you to tell the whole damn town that there are demons out there. I didn't tell you to make your own private army!"

"They aren't my army." Buffy replied evenly. "They are going to keep this town safe."

"Safe? _Safe_?" Wells seemed to be having difficulty coming up with a coherent response to that. "You declared war on multiple species on television and then slaughtered a squadron of Bringers - _Bringers_ \- and you think that the town is going to be _safe_?"

"Yes." Buffy said simply. "It will be. I will make it safe. Because that is my job." Buffy paused.

"Your job is definitely not to incite… well, just about everyone. If you keep this up, the whole town is going to blow up. Probably literally, the way you're going."

This wasn't Buffy's home. If it had been, then there would have been half-a-dozen weapons within easy reach, no matter which room she was in. And that was a conservative estimate. But here, all she had was a stake. She always carried a stake. You could never tell when a vampire might pop up.

So she took her stake, and purely on impulse, reversed it and held it out for Wells to take. Seemingly on instinct, Wells took it.

And now he was armed, and she wasn't. Admittedly, she was the Slayer. Buffy could definitely take the stake away from him as easily as she had given it. But, as she stood there, she put her hands behind her back. The message was clear. "Then stop me. You have a weapon. Come on. I won't stop you."

It wasn't much of a risk, just as it hadn't been when she had spread her arms and invited the demon gang to come and attack her. Then, because they had known that whoever went first was guaranteed to die. And now, because Buffy had been on television, speaking out against demons and evil and corruption and how it should be fought at all costs. If she was then found dead… well, the people who worked here were bound to have seen something. Even if they hadn't, what she had started was too big to stop now. She would be a martyr to her cause, and Wells couldn't have that.

"You know very well that your death won't get me anywhere." Wells said coldly. "You might be protected by… by your mob. But your friends? I can crush them before they even know what's going on. Sure, you can turn loose your rabble, but you can rest assured that nothing I do will ever be traced back to me."

And then, for the first time in a while, Buffy's voice took control. Before, it had been her that had ordered the extermination of the Bringers, it had been her that had spoken on television praising the man who had shot them in front of his family. All of it had been her, and no one else.

But it was her voice that said "You assume that you're going to leave here alive." It was her voice that said that, and it did so without even the slightest input from her brain.

Wells smiled faintly. "I must admit, I do rather plan on doing so. I am human, after all. I believe that makes me somewhat beyond your remit. Slayer."

It had been her voice that had threatened him.

But it was definitely her, and her alone, that said "I stopped Glory. I stopped the Master and the Mayor. I have kept this town safe from anyone and everyone that might want to destroy it. And then there's you. You, and others like you, have done just as much damage to this town as they ever did. There are more deaths on your head than on any of theirs. Do you really think that I won't stop you, just because you are human?"

If Wells was perturbed by the threat, he didn't give even the slightest indication of it. In fact, he just laughed. "Oh, you _have_ grown up, haven't you? You've let go of your naiveté and decided to join the _real_ world." Then he sobered. "Of course, if you think that I'm relying upon your tendency to leave humans alone to stay safe, then you are sadly mistaken. If you kill me now, your friends are just as dead. Your _sister_ is just as dead. Do I really seem like the kind of man who doesn't have contingency plans?"

And then Buffy spoke, and she genuinely didn't know whether it was her voice that spoke of its own volition, or if it was her with full support of her thinking mind. It sounded like the kind of thing that her voice said when it was left to its own devices. The kind of thing that could make an entire gang turn and run with just a handful of well-chosen words. But, then, Wells _had_ just threatened her friends and family. And Buffy wasn't exactly averse to roughing people up a little bit if it meant that she found out something she wanted to know. She'd done it to Willy often enough. She'd done it to Spike.

This? This wasn't that much of a stretch. It could have been her that said it. She wasn't sure.

"Perhaps I should rephrase myself. When I said that you assume that you're going to leave here alive, I didn't mean that I was going to cut you down where you stand. No. Because you are the kind of man who has contingency plans. I know that, throughout the time that Mayor Wilkins was running this town, he must have had a bunch of people like you under him. I'm betting that you've already got another one lined up to take your place. So, in the long run, it wouldn't _matter_ if I killed you." Buffy leaned forward. On instinct, Wells leaned back. "But there are so many things that I can do to you that won't kill you. I am the Slayer, Mr Wells. I have seen what the things in the dark can do. Would you like to see? Because I'm guessing that you break and call off your dogs long before I even get close to killing you. And then… then, maybe I'll kill you. Maybe. If I'm feeling generous. So tell me, Mr Wells. What was it you said you were going to do with my friends and family again?"

Wells swallowed audibly. "Nothing."

Buffy smiled beatifically, and her smile just happened to coincide with every bulb in the room shattering and plunging them both into darkness.

"Good."

* * *

When Buffy went home, she found that everyone was there, waiting for her. Everyone but her sister, that was, which didn't really surprise her. Everyone, all of her friends were sitting there waiting for her. Even though there was no banner, she could read the word 'Intervention' clearly enough. Obviously Wells wasn't the only one who disapproved about what she was doing.

So she was taken completely by surprise when Willow said "Thaumogenesis."

Buffy looked at her blankly. "What?"

"Often, when a big spell is cast, there is a… side effect. New magic is born. Or a new creature. And when I say a big spell, I mean a big spell like your resurrection." Willow paused. "And, um, we think that whatever got made by the thaumogenesis kind of… bonded itself to you. And that's why you've been acting so…"

"Creepy." Anya supplied helpfully.

"S-so we came up with an exorcism." Tara added.

Buffy didn't even have time to speak before Willow and Tara started chanting, and Anya and Xander stood and watched resolutely.

They stood and watched as the lights flared and went out, and Buffy crumpled, folding in on herself as the energies that the witches were manipulating flew around the room.

And then the spell was done, and Buffy was lying on the floor in a foetal position. She was shaking. She seemed to be crying.


	9. Chapter 9

_But at my back in a cold blast I hear_

 _The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear._

T. S. Eliot

* * *

She seemed to be crying.

The television turned on, or at least it appeared to. There wasn't even a hint of activity on the screen, but a voice came over the speakers. It was quiet, too quiet to actually understand, but it sounded as though it was just on the verge of being intelligible. The voice itself could have been male or female or both or neither. Everyone got the distinct impression that they _really_ didn't want to hear what it was actually saying.

She seemed to be crying.

A laugh started. It didn't seem to have any particular source, just a dark chuckle that rolled in from every corner of the room, creating odd echoes and rebounding in ways that no laugh should.

She seemed to be crying.

Someone started speaking, quite apart from the voice from the television and the eerie laugh. The thing was, the voice _was_ Buffy's. It was Buffy's, if you took her voice and threaded an odd, inhuman resonance through it. The voice wasn't muffled, though it should have been. Buffy was curled up in a foetal position. But the voice was as clear as if it had spoken directly into their ears, as though the speaker was so close that they could just reach out and touch them. Several of them looked around, so sure that the speaker had to be right behind them that they couldn't help but look.

She seemed to be crying.

But she wasn't.

"Do you think that I am some mewling newborn? Do you think that you can drive me away with your puny magic?" Buffy's voice said in a voice dripping with amusement.

Willow looked around the room, so sure that it couldn't be Buffy speaking, couldn't be her doing any of this that she looked for any evidence, any whatsoever, that there was someone else there. But she couldn't see anyone. There was just them, and Buffy. So she swallowed and said "Guess not."

"I was old when this planet was formed. I was ancient even before the universe began. I am from before time and light and space and matter. I am not the kind of thing that runs when a human says a handful of words."

"What are you then?"

Buffy stood, slowly unfurling herself from her foetal position. She stood, and at that moment you could have been forgiven for thinking that she was much taller than someone who stood a scant couple of inches over five feet.

But, even though Buffy seemed to take up considerably more space than she really should, even though she looked as though she was something very large which nevertheless managed to fit itself into a very small space, that wasn't the most noticeable thing about her.

Nor was the most noticeable thing the runes that adorned her skin, a kind of script the likes of which had never been seen on Earth. An ancient writing which made everyone's teeth hurt just looking at it, a language which made everyone nauseous just because it happened to be in the same room as them. No. That was not the most noticeable thing.

The most noticeable thing was her eyes. They were red. Not the kind of red that is usually meant when speaking of human eyes, which is achieved by crying. No. Her irises were red, and it was the kind of red which spoke of Hell and damnation and fury. Her eyes were red, and they were completely, utterly inhuman.

"I am Buffy." She said in a twisted perversion of Buffy's voice.

In another situation, perhaps Willow would have laughed at that, because this quite obviously _wasn't_ Buffy, general appearances to the contrary. Buffy wasn't some eldritch abomination. She was human, and if this thing was human then the definition had changed radically in the last few seconds without her noticing. But she didn't laugh, because she was scared half out of her mind. "No. No, you're not Buffy."

"I am Buffy. Everything that has been done since you brought me back has been Buffy. The words that I have spoken, they have been _her_ words. Words buried so deep in her subconscious that she would not have spoken them had I not drawn them forth. But they are her words. They are her feelings." The thing that spoke with Buffy's voice said. "I am Buffy. But I am also… so many things. How can it be that you do not know what I am? You have looked upon my works countless times over the last few years. You have seen the things that I have wrought, suffered because of things that I have made. I have been a part of your lives before you even _had_ lives, and yet now that I stand before you and you do not know me."

"What are you?" Willow asked again.

"I am hatred. I am fear and I am fury. I am the dark." The voice said, as though these things were so obvious that they almost didn't need saying. "I have been called many things. Which name would you like to hear? I am the breaker of worlds. I am the Adversary. I am Satan. I am the Devil. All of them. I am despair. I am the undying. I have been called so many things, but here and now… you do not need to know what I am called to know that I am here, and I am free."

"Right." Xander said slowly. "So we brought Buffy back, and now she's the Devil. Like, all of the Devils. I hope you don't mind if we don't buy that."

The voice shrugged Buffy's shoulders. "It is no concern of mine if you believe or if you do not. If you choose to ignore what is right in front of you… that is your own affair."

"What do you want?" Anya said. "Why are you here?"

All signs of amusement dropped from the warped, inhuman version of Buffy's face. The laugh, which had still been echoing throughout the room, cut out so entirely that the silence was as overwhelming as the laughter had been.

And into that silence the voice from the television spoke, and at last it was intelligible.

 _These are the words of the Beast_ …

"I will spread across this world like a plague. I will sow fear and hatred and guilt and I will watch as humanity turns on itself. I will watch as men gun down their families. I will watch as they fall to their knees, so overcome by despair that they cannot bear to live. I will watch as his comrades kill him. I will watch as your world burns. I will make your kind burn this world down until it is nothing more than a husk, the slightest remnant of what it once was populated by revenants that stalk through the ash and wail for what they have lost."

 _…the Legion shall be many…_

"I will make you tear down your own world."

 _…the Beast will rise..._

"B-but why?" Tara said, and she knew what the answer was going to be before she had even finished asking the question. It was going to be the same reason that _any_ evil creature gave. They were evil. Evil was what they did. You might as well ask why the sun rose each day. It was just something that they did.

To her mild surprise, the Beast actually seemed to pay some thought to the question. Eventually the answer came, and it wasn't the one that Tara had been expecting.

"What else is your kind for?"

 _…He is awake…_

"We'll stop you." Willow said forcefully. "We'll stop you and we'll bring Buffy back. We'll stop you."

The Beast laughed, and it was the same laugh that had earlier filled the room. Willow and the others suddenly found themselves hovering perhaps a foot above the ground. It wasn't magic. It wasn't telekinesis. The Beast wasn't using any kind of energy to hold them aloft. It was simply that the Beast wanted them to be there, and if the Beast wanted something then a little thing like gravity wasn't going to have a say in it. "Please. Go ahead. You have the power to wipe this body off of the face of creation with a wave of your hand. You can stop me before any of this goes any further. You can stop me right here and now. So come on. End this."

The seconds dragged by.

"I didn't think so." The Beast said. "You're afraid. That's why you brought Buffy back in the first place. You are so scared of being left alone that you would break down the doors of death to get your friend back. You could save the world, right here and now, but not without damning yourself in the process. You could end me before I even begin, but the cost… killing your best friend without even _trying_ to save her? No, you'd lose your soul."

"We'll save her." Xander said simply. "We'll save her and stop you."

The Beast looked at him and smiled, showing too many teeth for it to be friendly. "Would you like to hear a secret, Xander? Would you like to know something? I don't think you would." The Beast paused. "But then I suppose that you've kept enough secrets over the years, so maybe you're not the best judge. So I think I'll just tell you. Buffy threatened to torture someone today. Not me. I just watched. She threatened him all by herself, threatened to do such unspeakable things that even a man acquainted with _everything_ that goes on in this town was afraid. I had no hand in that. She's beyond saving, little boy. She's going dark. You've seen that before. You've seen what happened to the last Slayer you… loved, when she went dark and came so close to choking the life out of you. She's long gone, the Slayer you knew. She's still rotting in the ground where you left her. There is only the dark. There is only me now."

Xander blanched, but Willow stepped in. "We stopped Faith. We'll stop you too."

"No." The Beast said simply. "You won't. You can't. I am going to leave this room, and you won't stop me. I will continue what I'm doing, and you won't stop me. You can't. This town thinks that I'm a hero. Do you think that anyone, anyone at all, would believe a single word you said? How long do you think you'll last, as you watch me warp the people of this town until they are no better than the demons that feed upon them, knowing that there is not one single thing that you can do… I don't think you'll last very long. Your minds are too fragile." The Beast turned to Tara. "I think you'll go first. You've already tasted madness. You know what it is to live without hope. It shouldn't be very long before you let go and slip back into the warm embrace of insanity. But of course, you're welcome to try and stop me. Futility and exasperation and frustration… all too soon they lead to despair. And then I win."

And then the Beast turned and left, and there was only the parting words from the television before everything returned to normal and you could have been forgiven for forgetting that Evil Incarnate had stood there not one minute before.

 _…and you will worship Him._

And when the Beast left, the markings in it's skin faded, and the red eyes faded, and once again it was Buffy. And a blanket fell over her memories, and she forgot all that had just occurred.


	10. Chapter 10

_For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow_

 _Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me._

 _From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,_

 _Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,_

 _And soonest our best men with thee do go,_

 _Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery._

-John Donne

* * *

For the first time since Buffy had been resurrected she had nothing to do.

Actually, strictly speaking, that wasn't true. She was absolutely certain that if she went to somewhere public and said that she was starting a class right there and then on how to fight demons, she would have dozens of volunteers. There were plenty of things that she _could_ do.

But none of them needed to be done right then. There was nothing urgent that demanded her attention. For the first time since coming back from the dead, she had time to herself.

So she found herself wandering through Sunnydale. It wasn't like her ordinary patrols – it was daylight, for one, and people were turning to watch her as she went past for another. But then, it wasn't supposed to be a patrol. Just a walk. Just something that she could do by herself.

Buffy found that she still didn't entirely recognise the streets around her. When she saw them, she knew which street she was on, which cemeteries adjoined it and things like that. But she couldn't seem to fit it into her mental map of the town. She knew each street, but she couldn't quite seem to visualise how they all came together to make the town that she had lived in for years.

And then she came to an open square with a rusty, badly made tower in it, and she realised why.

Ever since she had moved here, Buffy had oriented herself from her house. Her house was the centre point for her mental map of the town – every patrol route, her walk to school, to the mall, everything started from her house and radiated outwards.

But then she had died. She had died here, because she had… jumped from this tower in front of her. She had died, and she had been brought back, and now when she was walking through the streets she couldn't manage to orient herself because her house was no longer the centre of her mental map – this tower was. To her, now, this tower, where she had died, was the centre of town. The location of everything else used this place as its starting point.

As Buffy was musing the change in her mental process, she saw something moving out of the corner of her eye. Someone trying to be sneaky, which wasn't really effective when the person you were trying to sneak away from was the Slayer.

Buffy whirled around, thinking that it must be some kind of demon – perhaps one of Glory's minions had survived the massacre – and was taken completely by surprise when she saw that it wasn't a demon, or a vampire. It was her sister.

"Dawn!" Buffy called out instinctively.

She was mildly surprised when Dawn stopped. She had expected her sister to continue slinking away, to go and play truant somewhere else where her sister wasn't. But she didn't. She stopped and turned around. She didn't come closer, though, and she looked at Buffy as though she was waiting for some kind of admonishment.

Buffy didn't say anything. What could she say? It wasn't as though she didn't have responsibilities herself, things that she should be doing. But instead she had come here. How could she fault her sister for doing the same?

Dawn looked like she didn't want to be there, but equally she didn't want to go. Buffy supposed that, given what she had said the last time they had spoken, that was a reasonable reaction. When it became clear that Buffy wasn't going to say anything, Dawn came a little bit closer and said "You're all anyone talks about at school, you know. How you're brave enough to take a stand. Everyone wishes that they could be like you." Dawn paused, apparently expecting Buffy to say something. She didn't. "Well, apart from the people who are too freaked out by everything. You know, Anya's been doing really well at the Magic Box since you got back. Selling lots of wards and protection spells. Even these little angel statues, which haven't been doing so well because, well, we have a lot of churches and they don't seem to be doing anyone-"

"I wasn't lying about what I said before." Buffy said, and her voice was so quiet that Dawn almost didn't catch it. For a second, Dawn thought about continuing on, filling the silence with meaningless babble, but she knew that that wouldn't really work. "When I said I wouldn't jump for you. I wasn't lying."

"I never said you were." Dawn said, wondering if it was too late to leave. She really didn't want to be having this conversation right now. Or at all, come to think of it.

Buffy remembered the moments that had led up to her death. The memory was hazy, as though it had happened to someone else – which wasn't really surprising, given that it had happened a lifetime ago. "It wasn't a jump. Oh, sure, maybe it was technically a jump. But it wasn't a jump."

Dawn looked at her, thinking that she didn't really want to hear this.

"Do you remember what I said to you, just before I… just before? Do you remember?"

"Of course. It isn't really the kind of thing that you can forget."

"I was standing up there, and I knew that one of us was going to die. One of us _had_ to die. And I wasn't going to let it be you. Not because I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I let you die for me, although that was definitely a part of it. But because I had spent _months_ being beaten by Glory, months watching as I lost everything – Riley, Mom, even you, kind of. I stood there and I thought…" Buffy trailed off, not sure how to say something which she barely understood herself.

Between finding out that her university Psychology professor was the quasi-evil head of a shady government organisation and then dropping out of said university, Buffy's grasp of psychological concepts wasn't the strongest.

She didn't know, for example, that there is sometimes a phenomenon that occurs when standing in high places where a human is suddenly grasped by an irrational urge to jump. Even though giving into this impulse would, more than likely, result in death it is far from uncommon. It is thought that it dates back to the time when humans were tree-dwelling primates, and this impulse would push them to see if they reached the next branch. There's even a term for it in French – 'L'appel du vide'.

The call of the void.

Buffy didn't know about that. But she did know that, when she had stood at the top of that tower, she hadn't had even the slightest impulse the jump. There hadn't been anything even remotely resembling the urge to leap from the top of the tower.

She had just felt the urge to fall.

And then the words came. Not easily. Never easily, not these words. But they came. She'd held them back before, last time she had spoken to Dawn. But not now. "…I thought that someone was going to die there, and if it was _me_ , if _I_ died, then maybe… it would stop. That I wouldn't have to be the Slayer, that there wouldn't be such a burden, that I wouldn't have to be the person that everyone looked to for answers. That it would just stop, and I could fall and it wouldn't be failure, it would be me saving you… I didn't jump for you, Dawn. I fell for myself."

Dawn opened her mouth to speak, and then shut it again. What could she say to that? What could she _possibly_ say?

"That's why I'm doing what I'm doing. Because if there are people to fight, if it isn't all on me, then maybe I can… maybe I can stop. Maybe then there'll be peace, and I won't have to keep fighting. Maybe then I can sleep through the night without having to wake up and go on patrol and kill something. Maybe then… maybe."

Dawn stood staring at her sister. Buffy wasn't looking at her. She was staring at the tower, but she got the distinct feeling that she wasn't really seeing it. She also thought that Buffy wasn't speaking to her, not really, that they were just words that needed to be said and that Dawn just happened to be there while they were being spoken.

And then Buffy blinked, and smiled, and looked at her, and she was Dawn's sister again. "I'm sorry, I don't even know why I told you that."

Dawn, somewhat awkwardly, put her hand on Buffy's shoulder. And then, somehow, she wasn't quite sure how, she was hugging Buffy and Buffy was hugging her. "It's okay, Buffy, it's okay. Everything is going to be okay."


	11. Chapter 11

_The false can never grow into truth by growing in power._

-Rabindranath Tagore

* * *

The people of Sunnydale weren't entirely blind. They knew that _something_ was going on in their town. But perhaps they were too scared to face it, preferring instead to bury their heads so deeply in the sand that they couldn't hear the screams. Or maybe they had been bought off, paid to look in the other direction. Or, then again, maybe they _did_ know, but found it simply too unbelievable to accept, and so decided instead that they would accept whatever vaguely plausible explanation the media fed them.

In any case, now they knew for sure. They had been told, and they had seen. They had seen the monstrous, inhuman Bringers who brought with them an air of pestilence, of death and decay. And they had seen them die. They knew that the supernatural world was out there, but they also knew that it could be fought. That these things, these creatures, they weren't immortal. If you were strong, you could fight back.

And the demons knew they knew. For more than a century, this had been their town. They had been free to kill and feed with impunity – that is, until the Slayer had arrived, and even then she couldn't catch them all. But now there were many, many more people than just her, and all of them wanted their kind destroyed.

But the humans weren't stupid. They knew that the demons wouldn't be taking this kind of thing lying down. They wouldn't just roll over and let themselves be driven extinct. They would strike now, while they were still strong and the humans weren't.

So, many shops closed early. The Bronze, which was accustomed to finding the occasional dead body drained of blood in the alleyway outside, didn't open for business. Neither did the shadier establishment The Fish Tank, which not only had semi-regular vampire feedings but was also the subject of police raids.

But then, there were the shops that had never been raided. The shops in the coveted position of the Mall, for example. The shops that paid people like Wells to make sure that they didn't get attacked, to make sure they were protected and that their rivals weren't. The kind of shops which remained as untroubled as any shops could be in a town like Sunnydale.

These kind of shops didn't shut early. They still believed in the system that had shielded them for decades. They didn't believe that it could be upended in a matter of days, all because a little blonde decided to make a few speeches. And their customers, people coming out of school or back from work, people who had never once been accosted by something unexplainable while they were there, they didn't go home and lock the doors.

They didn't close early. They didn't go home.

And the sun was setting.

* * *

Suddenly, demons were everywhere. It seemed like one second the Mall was a bustling building filled with content shoppers, and the next there were monsters bursting through windows, through doors, even through the floors. There were creatures walking on the walls in much the same way that a human might walk on the ground. There were demons which were generally content to keep to themselves, even some which weren't even interested in humans at all but felt as though they were driven to violence in order to defend themselves.

And people ran, and screamed, and died.

And they fought.

They attacked the demons with whatever was handy. Handbags, potted plants, plates. They were surrounded by shops full of stuff, and they used all of it.

And then there were the police, with their guns that they rarely used and their training that they had half-forgotten, as it had been subsumed by the comfortable lethargy of knowing that no matter what they did they weren't going to make a difference, so they might as well do nothing and be paid handsomely for it. They fought too, as best they could, even though their bullets weren't nearly as effective as they would have liked.

And then, suddenly, there was Buffy. She moved through the chaos as though it was a dance which only she knew the steps to, and with every movement a demon died. They fell before her like wheat before a scythe. She was the Slayer.

But there were a lot of demons, more than she had ever seen in one place, more even than the demon gang. She couldn't fight them all, she couldn't be everywhere at once. She couldn't save everyone. Not if she had to keep going like this and kill every single one of them here and now. Besides, they at any moment they notice that she was there and then they would be on her like a tsunami. Probably the only reason they hadn't done that already was that the demons were taking the opportunity to settle a few scores amongst themselves.

In any battle there are linchpins. If you take them down, then the morale of the opposing force crumbles. They just fall apart. Just as the demon gang had, after Buffy had intimidated them and then killed their leader.

On the human side, there was just her.

It was hard to tell on the demons side, though, because they were such a disparate force. But Buffy identified a few targets that she should take out first.

The first were the strange demons that she hadn't seen before, that walked on the walls and plucked humans from the ground and then tore them apart. The police targeted them, but they were fast and never stayed in the same place long enough for their rusty marksmanship to come into effect. There were only two of them, making them amongst the rarest of the demons there, but in terms of body count they were way up there – and they could just walk over any impromptu barricades humans might make.

The second was a big reptilian demon. This one wasn't fast, but seemed unfazed by bullets, or walls, or indeed anything that got in its way. It just casually crushed anything that was within reach.

The third was a female vampire who moved like she was at least a century old. Buffy briefly wondered why she hadn't come across her before, until she saw the way she fought. In her human guise, she pretended to _be_ a human and ran screaming with the rest of them – until she came into a sizeable knot of humans, which she promptly slaughtered. She was too careful to ever be seen doing it, and she stayed away from any demons that might mistake her for a human. Someone like her was too careful to ever come to a Slayer's attention. Until tonight, at least.

But first things first.

Buffy ran towards the nearest of the wall-climbing demons. She jumped in the air, pushed off the shoulder of a nearby human to leap even higher and grabbed the demons leg. They both fell to the ground with a thump, and the demon already had its hands around her neck and was squeezing. It was strong. She broke its wrists and stabbed it with her stake, before turning and throwing its corpse at its comrade. That fell too, and was promptly riddled with bullets thanks to a particularly observant policewoman.

The demons had noticed that she was there now, but she didn't care. She was the Slayer, and this was her town. No one was going to wreck it. She was going to keep it safe.

The female vampire died before she even knew Buffy was nearby, and then she was in front of the reptile demon. Far from being afraid to see the Slayer right up close, it just smiled, showing too many razor sharp teeth for an ordinary mouth. "I hear you've been looking for me, Slayer."

Buffy tilted her head to one side. "No, not really. I've been kind of busy." And then she killed it.

Buffy decided that she had had enough.

"Stop." Her voice wasn't loud. Over the sound of screams and guns and breaking things, she shouldn't have been heard. Even someone right next to her should have had difficulty hearing what she was saying.

But they did hear her. Everyone heard her. And they obeyed. If someone had asked them why, they would have been hard pressed to answer. But the answer itself was simple.

It was the same reason that a person would freeze when they're in danger. They searched desperately for a way out, a way to safety – or failing that, they stood still in the vain hope that they wouldn't be noticed. The voice, the voice that was so quiet that it sounded as though it had been whispered directly in their ears but also seemed like it would have carried through a thunderstorm, appealed directly to some primitive part of their brains. The part of the brain that governed fear.

"You've lost. You know that. Look around. How many of you are dead? How many of you have died from human hands – unskilled, untrained human hands? We have won. We are still here. You tried to sweep us away, crush us before we were strong. And you failed. We won. We are still here, and you will never, ever scare us away." Buffy paused, more for impact than anything else. "So run. Take your dead and run. Because the humans are here, and we will triumph. We will drive you away – so take the chance and run. Run, and tell your kind that we are coming. Because we are. We-"

"Run. Run and hide. Run, because the real monsters are coming. The human race." The effect of this new voice was jarring. After Buffy's voice, which seemed to almost bypass the ears and speak directly to the mind, this new voice, which blared over the Mall's speaker system was like a harsh alarm clock awakening them from a dream.

Everyone turned to see Wells, dressed in an immaculate suit. He obviously hadn't fought, hadn't been anywhere near the fighting. But he was there for the aftermath. Of course.

And the demons did leave, because they had lost. Their dead littered the floor, and the humans, well, there were a lot more of them than there were of the demons. And they were armed, and led, and looked they would slaughter them without a second thought, not out of a survival instinct but out of a deep-seated hatred of things that are other.

Buffy looked back at the humans, only to see that they were all looking at her. There weren't looking at Wells, weren't interested in him in the slightest. They were all looking at her, waiting for her to speak.

Buffy looked deep inside herself, trying to find the right words.

 _I hear you've been looking for me, Slayer._

Oh.

"I could stand hear and congratulate you for what you've done. I could stand here and laud you for standing your ground and fighting. But the truth is, it's not enough. Not nearly enough. Because fighting the demons is only half the battle." Buffy turned and looked at Wells – the man who had had his bank robbed by a demon, a demon that he had told her to hunt down. A demon that she had just killed, a demon that could only have known that she was coming after it if someone had told it – and only Wells had known. "There is more to fight than just the things that go bump in the night."

"I think she's talking about me." Wells said, voice filled with dark amusement. In other circumstances, his tone, so carefully tailored to discredit Buffy might have accomplished his goal. But not now, not with him in his perfect suit, not when everyone else was weary and injured and Buffy was just like them. Not when she had a voice that seemed to speak directly to a part of their brain that wasn't interested in rhetoric or cunning arguments but just wanted to fight or flee. "She has this mistaken idea that I'm somehow responsible for the things that happen in this town."

Words. That was what it boiled down to, in the end. That is what wins battles. Wells couldn't have just killed her with no witnesses. No. He had to cut her down here and now with everyone watching. He had to discredit her and everything she had done.

And that wasn't right. That wasn't right at all.

"You are like a cancer in this town." Buffy said simply. "Everything that happens, every death, it all leads back to you."

"Mr Franklin!" Wells' voice boomed over the speakers. "Who was it who gave you an extension on your mortgage payments when your business went under? And Mrs Beckett, who was it who gave you an interest free loan when you lost your job? Does that really sound like the kind of thing someone would do if they were a 'cancer'?"

Before Buffy had a chance to respond, to talk about how of course Wells would act charitably if it kept people in Sunnydale to feed to the demons when they got restless, Wells spoke again. "This crusade that Ms Summers has started you on is all very commendable, in its way. But the lady herself? Not quite so much. She has these delusional ideas that she is going to save this town and – well, you only have to look around to see what this kind of salvation leads to. But she is so set on this course that, when I tried to reason with her this morning, she threatened me!" So saying, Wells held aloft a voice recorder, and Buffy realised why he had _really_ come to speak to her in the studio. She wouldn't have been surprised if this entire assault was entirely thanks to him, just so that they could all be here for this.

And then Wells pressed play, and there was nothing but hissing static. He frowned, and shook it slightly. And then a voice came, and it wasn't the voice that Wells had wanted. It was a dark, twisted thing, masked by the static.

 _I have seen what the things in the dark can do. Would you like to see?_

It didn't sound like an offer, or a threat. It sounded like a promise.

And then the static cleared, and a voice spoke. A voice instantly recognisable as Wells'. _Your friends? I can crush them before they even know what's going on. Sure, you can turn loose your rabble, but you can rest assured that nothing I do will ever be traced back to me. Your friends are just as dead. Your sister is just as dead._

Buffy leant forward. "Yes, Mr Wells. That sounds exactly like the kind of thing that a human cancer would say."

And the crowd surged, ready to crush this man who would tear down their saviour, when Buffy said "No. There are policemen here. There will be justice for what he has done. We can't be like him, we can't just end him here in the night. He has to pay for what he has done, yes, but not like this. This has to be done properly. We have to restore order."

And Wells smiled, thinking that he was rich and powerful, the kind of man who had connections and wouldn't stay in prison long. With his contacts he could be broken out leaving no one the wiser.

Buffy looked back at him, the poor man who didn't even know that he was ruined. He was finished. His usefulness was over. Everyone here knew what he was, and that made him more than worthless – to the kind of people that he associated with, that made him a liability. He'd sit in his cell, thinking that he'd be free at any moment… right up until the moment that someone came, and he'd be filled with despair as he realised that they weren't going to save him. And then he'd be found in the morning, having hung himself, or perhaps having died of a fatal heart attack.

And then the people he worked with would move in on this town, keen to keep the status quo, to keep themselves in power, and there would be more chaos and death and destruction, and she would be right in the middle of it, she would be-

Wells was led out of sight, and Buffy blinked and looked away.


	12. Chapter 12

_Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion._

-Joseph Conrad

* * *

What Buffy needed was a shower and good night's sleep.

What she did _not_ need was to go home and see that Dawn was sitting up waiting for her, looking like she had no intention whatsoever of going to bed any time soon. She looked like she wanted to talk – well, actually she looked like she would rather be on the other side of the world and far, far away from Sunnydale and anything related to it, but she looked like she _needed_ to talk.

Although, apparently, the small talk was going to come first. "So. Good patrol?"

Buffy blinked. The battle at the mall had taken up so much of her thoughts that it hadn't even occurred to her that other people in town wouldn't have known about it. Word would spread, of course, but obviously it hadn't yet. "Sure, I guess. Productive."

Then Dawn looked away and absently traced a pattern on her knee. "So, you want to hear a crazy story?"

"No." Buffy replied honestly. "I want to go to sleep and wake up some time next week."

"Right, right. Of course." Dawn paused. "Your friends think you're Satan."

Out of all the crazy things that Dawn could have said, out of all of the crazy things that Buffy had already heard just by living on a Hellmouth, out of everything that might even have remotely occurred to her right then, she would _never_ have expected that.

" _What_?"

"Well, they said that earlier they tried to do some kind of… exorcism thing on you, because you know, you've been acting kind of odd since you… and you kind of, um, had these massively weird red eyes and some kind of spooky writing on your skin and you did some kind of big evil speech. Or that's what they say, anyway."

"Dawn, someone's been playing games with you." Buffy said slowly. "I mean, look at me! Do I look like Satan to you?"

"No." Dawn replied. "But then, you don't normally go on TV with an oddly charismatic speech and get the whole town fired up and then go out and slaughter some Bringers."

"Seriously. You think that I'm the Devil… because I killed some guys that work for the Devil." Buffy said incredulously. "How does that make any _kind_ of sense?"

"They seemed pretty convinced, Buff. And, I mean, why would you make that kind of stuff up?"

"Dawn, tomorrow the news is going to be filled with stuff about this guy Wells. You know how the Mayor used to hush stuff up? Wells is the guy who took over. He'd been intimidating and bribing people left and right. And he doesn't like me. Like, at all. He threatened you and the gang. He, I don't know, maybe he hired some witch or something. It seems like his style."

"Right. Okay. That makes more sense." Dawn looked relieved. At least slightly. Buffy got the distinct feeling that her sister was in for a sleepless night though. "But that's all taken care of, right? Everything's been sorted out?"

"Yup. Wells isn't going to be bothering any of us again."

Since the Thaumogenesis incident, Willow and Tara had moved out. They hadn't thought that it was a good idea to live with someone who professed to be every single devil all at once. Especially not when there was some fairly compelling evidence that it wasn't lying. Sadly, Xander and Anya's apartment didn't have room for two extra people to move in, but thankfully Willow and Tara were still enrolled in college and, Sunnydale being Sunnydale, student housing was always becoming available.

But they'd made something of a base of operations in The Magic Box. It was somewhere relatively private that was filled with all the magical supplies that anyone could possibly want. It was somewhere they could go to plan.

So, the quartet were somewhat surprised when they entered the shop the following morning and found Buffy there waiting for them. She looked like she had been there for quite some time.

"I can't believe you told Dawn that I was Satan!" Buffy said the moment they came in.

"Well, in our defence…" Xander began. "I guess now's not the time.

"It's Wells, it's got to be Wells! He's messing with your heads! Can't you _see_?"

"Who's Wells?" Anya murmured.

Willow looked at her friend sadly, raised a hand and said "Revelatio." Revelation.

The pressure in the room dropped like a stone.

Otherwise, nothing happened.

"Eh, Will?" Xander said. "Was that meant to do something?"

"Well, it was supposed to make the thing possessing Buffy reveal itself." She sounded disappointed that it hadn't worked.

"I told you." Buffy said coldly. "I'm not possessed. There's no one here but me."

"T-the… other guy, h-he said that too." Tara said.

Buffy leant back in her chair. "I understand. You know, I thought the reason that you brought me back was because I made you feel important. Like you were actually doing something with your lives. Like you were making a _difference_."

"See, its things like that that make us think you're evil." Xander said quickly.

"But it's not, is it? That's not the whole story. You're scared of being alone. I was there, I was at the centre of your lives, and then the next second I was gone. And if I could go…" Buffy stood and began pacing back and forth. "If I could die, just like that, then so could any of you. You could wake up one morning knowing that you are the last one left, that you'd been so involved with your patrols and your magic that you just didn't stop until everyone was dead or gone. Until you'd lost everyone, just like Mom or Jenny or Jesse. And that _terrifies_ you." Buffy stopped next to the angel statues that Anya was only now beginning to be able shift. "You're more scared of the people around you vanishing than you are of anything else."

The room began to get darker. It wasn't that the light faded – the sun shone every bit as bright as it normally did. The bulbs gave off exactly the same amount of light as they always had. But nevertheless, it seemed as though the room was getting darker. It seemed like the light was entering the room and then just falling away, as though it was flowing to some other place entirely.

"And it should." Someone said in a voice that sounded as though it could be heard through walls, the kind of voice that was so full of malice and menace that it belonged to a world of darkness and torment. A voice like that should never see the light of day. And the voice was Buffy's.

"You should be scared of being alone. Because, in the end, that is all that you are."

Buffy looked up, and her eyes were red and her skin was adorned with obscene symbols. "But perhaps you need to be reminded of that. Perhaps you need to be reminded that you are alone. That you are the loneliest creatures in the universe."

Beside her, the angels were growing. It seemed that the light that should have been illuminating the room was instead being sucked into the angels, as they grew. And as they grew their hands crept up in front of their eyes, and their mouths opened in a silent scream.

And then the lights went out, and there was complete and utter silence for the space of a second. And then the lights came on again, and the sun was shining, and the angels were so close to the four friends that they could have reached out and touched them if they weren't as immobile as the statues that they had been just a handful of seconds earlier.

"My lonely assassins. They will spread throughout the worlds, angels that bring fear wherever they tread. Blink, and they are on you. Look away and you are theirs. Look away and you are lost. Between one moment and the next they will snatch you away. And they will remind you that, ultimately, you are all alone. Because that is what they are. They are your loneliness, your fear and your dread. An idea carved in stone. An idea that walks, an idea that _kills_."

There was a deep, rumbling laugh which didn't seem to come from Buffy. It seemed as though the very air was amused, a rich, dark and sadistic amusement directed entirely at the quartet. "Do you surrender yet? Will you give in to the despair or will you fight a little longer, until the hopelessness weighs so heavily on you that you are crushed beneath it? Because either way… _I win_."

And then Buffy walked out, leaving her friends to fend off the Weeping Angels as best they could.


	13. Chapter 13

_Magic shall be written upon the sky by the rain but they shall not be able to read it;_

 _Magic shall be written on the faces of the stony hills but their minds shall not be able to contain it;_

 _In winter the barren trees shall be a black writing but they shall not understand it..._

-Susanna Clarke

* * *

The first hint that Buffy had that he was there was the smell of cigarette smoke. She didn't pay it any heed, though. There were a lot of people who smoked – besides, it was day time, and the sun was shining.

But still, Buffy wasn't particularly surprised to round a corner and find Spike standing in a patch of shadow. She wondered absently how long he had been standing there.

"What are you doing, Buffy?" Spike said. He sounded tired.

Buffy tilted her head and looked at him as though she was perfectly aware that he had spoken but she couldn't quite seem to find any meaning in his words. "What do you mean?"

He gestured vaguely with a hand that held a cigarette. "All of this. This… campaign of yours. You know it's only going to end when everyone is dead."

"No. Just your kind, Spike. The demons and the things that go bump in the night. The things that should only be found in horror stories, not in real life. When you are all dead, then it will be over." Buffy said calmly. She'd said it before. She'd told Wells, and Dawn, and her friends. She'd told the whole town. "Only then will it be finished. When there isn't any need for a Slayer anymore."

"And how many are going to die before that happens?" Spike replied. "Don't you see? Last night, your shopping centre… that was just the start. It's not over, not by a long shot. There are more of… more of _us_ than you can imagine, Buffy. And you can believe me when I say that we aren't going to go quietly into that good night."

"I wouldn't expect you to." Buffy said quietly. "I know that this is going to be hard. That people will die. That, for a time, things will be worse than it ever was. But, eventually, when the war is over… then everything will be as it was meant to be. Humans won't just be a tiny race clinging to our world by our fingertips. At any second a demon might come and I'll be too slow, and then it'll stomp on those fingers and out entire race will go plunging into the abyss. The world is on the brink of being nothing more than dust and ashes. I have to save it, Spike. I'm the only one who can."

Spike looked at her for a long time. Long enough that Buffy thought that he wouldn't reply at all, that he might just leave without a word. He took a long drag on his cigarette, and only then did he speak. "You might just make it, Buffy. You might get this utopia of yours. But you won't be fit to live in it. You're making everyone in this town into killers, and it's not going to stop there. You might kill all the demons, but the monsters? They'll be there any time you lot look in a mirror."

Buffy couldn't understand what he was saying. Oh, she heard the words, she even knew what each individual word meant. But when he put them together in a sentence like that, they just seemed to be utterly devoid of any kind of sense. It seemed like the words just didn't fit inside her head, as though they were entirely the wrong shape. So she discarded them.

After a while, when it became obvious that Buffy wasn't going to speak, Spike said "You know, every day since Buffy died I wondered what I would say to her, if there was some kind of miracle and I got to speak to her again." Spike dropped the remains of his cigarette and crushed it beneath his shoe. "But I guess I can wonder for a while longer."

Spike slunk off, staying the shadows. Buffy didn't watch him go. She turned and took a different route.

* * *

When Dawn had envisaged this, she had thought that she'd be sitting in front of a sheet of plate glass with him on the other side. She had thought that she'd be talking to him through a telephone. But it wasn't like that at all. Maybe it was because this was Sunnydale, or because the legal system didn't really work like that, or maybe it was something else entirely. She wasn't sure.

In any case, when Dawn visited Wells, it was in a room with nothing whatsoever between them. There was a guard to make sure that neither of them did anything untoward, but given that Dawn was Buffy's sister he was at a respectful distance. If it wasn't for the Spartan nature of the room, it could almost have been a normal meeting in a normal place.

Almost. Wells looked somewhat more battered than he had at his appearance in the mall. His suit was scuffed and torn in places. There was the beginnings of a spectacular bruise high on one cheek.

But his voice was smooth and calm as ever. "So, you're her. The Slayer's little sister. The Key."

Dawn blinked and started back instinctively. "You know about that?"

Wells smiled faintly. "It's our job to know about things like that. You don't have to worry. We like the universe the way it is. But you're not here about that, are you?"

"No. I'm here…" Dawn paused. She should probably have thought this through a little bit more. Buffy had told her that Wells was bad, that he'd stepped right into the hole that the Mayor's death had left. And so, when she'd heard that he had tried to play some kind of recording that he had claimed featured her threatening him, she had thought that she should come and see him. Especially in light of the fact that Buffy's friends had all said that Buffy seemed to be possessed by the Devil, and threatening someone was exactly the kind of thing that the Devil would do. But it might have been a good idea if she had planned what she was going to say ahead of time. "I'm here about my sister."

Wells looked at her intently. Dawn got the distinct impression that, if he had been wearing glasses, he would be looking at her over the top of them. "That's interesting. You live with her, but you still come to me to answer your questions. Obviously you think that there's something… _off_ about her."

Dawn thought about denying it. This man probably couldn't be more suavely evil if he tried. But, honestly, what did it matter? He was going to go to prison for a long, long time, and he'd already tried to discredit Buffy once. No one would believe a word he said. "Yes."

"When I was… _put_ in here, I thought that your sister was being naive. That she couldn't _really_ believe that I couldn't get out, with all my resources and all my contacts. I thought that she was just being young and foolish. And then, as I lay there in the dark, a thought came to me. I wondered… what would I do, if our roles were reversed? And I realised that I would do exactly what she did. Give me hope. Because now that I am here, now that the whole town and everyone in it knows who I am and what I have done… I am ruined. No one is coming to get me out. The best I can hope for is a knife in the dark. And I thought that she was naive. She is crueller than I ever was, little girl, and she does it all in the name of salvation. She tells you that she's saving you, and you're all following her blindly… right up to the moment where she leads you all the Hell."

Dawn wanted to dismiss what he was saying. More than anything, she wanted to call him insane, call him crazy. But the words made too much sense. They fit with her fears like a jigsaw puzzle that was just starting to come together. There was too much truth for her to completely ignore what he was saying.

At least, she couldn't ignore him entirely.

"You're not sure yet." Wells said, correctly reading the expression on her face. "You haven't seen the void gaping in front of you, just waiting for you to hurl yourselves into it. You're not convinced. Not yet."

Dawn said nothing.

"Tell her to look at the gnome in her garden." Wells said. "Just tell her. See how things go from there."

"We don't _have_ a gnome in our garden." Dawn pointed out.

Wells just smiled.

* * *

As it turned out, they did have a gnome in their garden. And the gnome had a camera in it.

Buffy promptly took it to the engineers in the studio, the ones who had been complaining about the 'creepy' static. Normally she would have taken it to Willow, but she didn't think that seeing her would be a good idea. Besides, if anyone was going to know about cameras, it would be people who worked in a studio.

As it turned out, it was much, much easier than Buffy would have thought to trace the cameras signal to a computer. Even the engineers were surprised. They were even more surprised at how easy it was to get access to the computer that the camera was linked to.

So Buffy spent the next half an hour skimming through the computer files. She found that the gnome wasn't the only camera, not by a long shot. She also found that it was part of some nefarious scheme by a trio of bored people to become supervillains and take over Sunnydale. She even knew them.

She knew where they lived.

So she made sure that everyone in town knew that she was going to be giving a speech right outside their house, and that they should all be there. She made sure that it wasn't broadcast, so that there was no chance of the trio finding out about it.

* * *

It looked like most of the town turned up. They stood there, milling around, wondering why they were here. Was there going to be another attack? Were they going to out other people like Wells? Or was it something else entirely?

But they all went silent when Buffy stood on a makeshift podium.

"You're all wondering why you're here. You're wondering if there's some kind of demon on this street, and I have called you here so that you can see how easily I can vanquish it. Or maybe you think that someone like Wells lives here, someone who will bribe or buy or threaten anyone to get what he wants. But it's not that." Buffy paused. "It's worse. Because as bad as demons are, because even though they are dangerous, they don't stop you from being human. They don't turn you into objects. As for Wells and people like him, they were only able to operate precisely _because_ you were human. They played on your desires and fears like a violin, forcing you to dance to their tune. But these people who live in the house behind me, they aren't demons. They don't want to feed off you, or manipulate you. They want to rule the town just because they can. Because they don't see you as people. Just pawns in a game. They would crush you beneath their feet and not even notice that you were there."

Buffy spread her arms wide, as though she could encompass the entire crowd. "But we see them. These people who want nothing more than to turn you into slaves. We see them. They live in this house. But the question is; what are you going to do about it?"

There was brief pause. Then, like some kind of mindless organism, the crowd surged forward, acting with one mind intent on one thing. They only wanted to be free.

Buffy didn't watch them go. She stood on her podium, staring at the rapidly emptying space in front of her.

Words. It all came down to words. Her words against everyone else's. Any of them could have stood up and asked a question, have derailed her completely, spoken against her. But they hadn't, because her words spoke to some deep part of their subconscious. Because there was a magic in words, and only she was clever enough to see it.

Buffy turned to watch the house get set on fire. Afterwards, no one was quite sure how it had happened. She watched as some strange half-made mechanical person erupted from the front door, tossing people left and right as though it was in a hurry to escape. Three people came out behind it, who then launched themselves into the air with jetpacks. A deep, booming voice echoed from the air, saying "You'll burn for this, Slayer. You'll burn!"

And behind her, Buffy didn't see Dawn watching her intently. Nor did she see the angel sitting perched on a nearby wall as though it had always been there. Its face was buried in its hands, as though it couldn't bear to see the things that she had done.


	14. Chapter 14

_Where it was, Being will be._

-Sigmund Freud

* * *

All in all, the fire wasn't so bad. The fire brigade was called, but only because no one wanted it to spread to other houses. They would be perfectly happy to see the house burn to the ground, but they would much rather that the houses on either side weren't damaged.

But people still milled around. Some of them called for a hunt to find the trio. Others wanted to find more people like them and burn their houses too. Still others thought that now would be a perfect time to go demon hunting.

And then there was Buffy, up on her podium. No one came up to talk to her. She was alone. She was their general. Where she went they would follow, but that didn't mean that she was one of them. She was separate. She was other.

But that didn't matter. She _was_ different. There were things that she knew, things that she could do, that set her apart.

Her voice carried easily, even over all the talk. "I could reprimand you for what you've done. I could stand here and tell you that we will never be able to beat people like this, let alone demons, unless we are _better_ than they are. But I'm not going to do that. Because, really, what have you done wrong? You have set fire to a house, yes. That's true. But that's only so that you could smoke out the enemy. There isn't anything to be guilty about, because you have done nothing wrong. Did you know that the concept of guilt arises from a sense of debt? It was long thought that those who were guilty of some crime or other owed something to the victims of the crime. Even if they themselves didn't think they were guilty, their crime, their _punishment_ was paid to cover their debts to society, because it was in the eyes of society that they had committed their crime. It was to them that the debt was owed. But I don't see any crime. All I see are people who are willing to fight for their lives, for their families, for their freedom. And there is no crime in that. There is no need for guilt. This is just the start, and if we flinch now then we are lost. I won't lie to you. There is worse yet to come. You will be called to do much, much more than you have today. And I want you to know – there is no point in feeling guilty for _any_ of it. We have to move beyond that now."

Buffy was finished, but even if she hadn't been, she wouldn't have been able to say anything else even if she'd wanted to. She was drowned out by cheers.

* * *

Buffy went home. She had told everyone that the best thing to do was just to carry on with their lives. The trio would reappear eventually, and there would be other crises – but in the meantime, the best thing that they could do would be to live.

So Buffy went home, and she saw Dawn sitting there, waiting for her. Buffy didn't bother to ask her why she wasn't in school. She just sat across from her and waited for her sister to say whatever it was that was obviously bothering her.

"They aren't wrong. Your friends, I mean. You're probably not Satan, but you aren't the saviour of this town either." Dawn said slowly. She obviously didn't want to say it. She looked like she would much rather say just about anything else. But some things needed to be said. "You're turning everyone into monsters. Remorseless murderers. I don't think you even know that you're doing it."

"I'm fighting the monsters, Dawn." Buffy said simply. "I'm not one of them."

"There's a girl in my class. She was boasting about how her dad helped you kill the Bringers. How he brought out his old shot gun and went out and killed them."

"The girl across the street? Good for her. She should be proud. Her father did a good thing there."

But Dawn wasn't finished. "And then someone else said that they heard that he'd started crying, afterwards. That he had just broken down. They said it as an _insult_. As though people shouldn't cry when they kill someone. As though the taking of a life was just something routine that you can boast about, like getting a new car."

Buffy sat back. That wasn't right. That wasn't right at all. "No, Dawnie. The Bringers weren't people. They were just things. Monsters. They should be killed on sight. It should be like taking out the trash – because, really, that's what they are. The dregs of the universe."

"And those people, the ones who lived in that house. What about them? They're human, Buffy. They have families and friends. You know them. They're too ineffectual to actually hurt anyone. All they did is rob a bank, and even then no one got hurt. They just sat up there and watched. And you would have had them killed for that. You would have been perfectly happy to see those people dead. You wouldn't have cared, and you want to make sure that no one else would care either. Where does it end, Buffy? Do you even see how wrong it is?"

"Do you? They robbed a bank. They had money, and technology. You saw that mechanical thing they built. What could they have done with more time? You know this town. You know the kind of thing that happens in this town. They could have done anything. So I stopped them. Now everyone knows them and what they're up to. They can't hide, and they can't hurt anyone. I'm keeping this town safe, Dawn. Why don't you get that?"

"Because you're not. Oh, physically, sure. There isn't going to be a robot army made by three bored and juvenile twentysomethings. That's fine. But the people you're keeping safe? They aren't going to be people much longer. They're just going to be weapons. You're turning them into that."

"I'm a weapon, Dawn." Buffy said calmly. "I am the Slayer. I kill things. That is what I'm for. I thought that maybe I could have a normal life – but look at me. My friends are all gone. I died fighting, and I was brought back so I can fight some more. Even if I die again, there's Faith, and then whoever comes after her. This won't ever end, not if there's just one girl in all the world. There needs to be more of us."

Dawn's voice was so quiet that, even with her Slayer hearing, Buffy had to strain to hear her. "Do you even see them? The people that you're 'saving'? Are they even real to you? They aren't just weapons, Buffy. They're human beings. You have to see that."

"Humans are killers. You _know_ that demons aren't the only things out there that you should be afraid of. People like the Mayor, or Wells. How many wars are going on now, between humans? We are killers, Dawn. It's in our nature. The best we can do is make sure that there isn't anything that kills us."

"I've been human for a year, Buffy. Don't talk to me about human nature. Look at Tara. She's never killed anything in her life. Neither has that girl across the street. Neither had her dad, until you got into his head and made him think that he _had_ to be a killer. If there is a human nature, it is a nature that we make. We are all what we make ourselves. I might not be human, Buffy. At any second the spell the monks used on me might just… stop, and I'll be the Key again. But until then I will be human. And I'm not going to be a weapon in your hand."

"Then you will die." Buffy said simply. "I will save them, but only if they follow me. They can't be the kind of people who would bow before people like Wells. They can't be people who will stick their heads in the sand and ignore the world even when it comes crashing down around them. So what if they are weapons? So what if they are killers? Demons have been preying on mankind since before we first came down from the trees. They will keep doing so until we die, or they do. I would see this town and everyone in it destroyed if it would close the Hellmouth. If there is a choice between being killers or being dead, then I chose life."

Dawn looked at her sadly. "And you wonder why your friends have gone. How can you save people when you can't even see them as human? I might not be human, Buffy, but neither are you. Not anymore. People aren't things. They aren't just tools that you can use for your goal. Until you see that… this won't end, Buffy. It can't. You're just making your own demons."

Dawn stood and left, leaving her words echoing in her sister's head.


	15. Chapter 15

_He stood a stranger in this breathing world,_

 _An erring spirit from another hurled;_

 _A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped_

 _By choice the perils he by chance escaped_

-Lord Byron

* * *

Words.

As always, it came down to words. Her words, Dawn's words, her friends' words. They were, all of them, just expelled air that they decided had meaning. She could discount them entirely, if she so chose. She could ignore everything that anyone said, and continue on her path.

She wanted to do that. She did. She was sure that she was doing the right thing, that she was helping people.

But if there was one person whose words she couldn't ignore, it was her own. She wasn't that much of a hypocrite.

 _I'm a weapon, Dawn._

That was all that she had ever been. Oh, she could pretend otherwise, she could have relationships, friendships, a life outside of the fight. But ultimately all of that was a lie. She was the Slayer, and all there was, was the fight. Her fight. The fight that she was now dragging other people into, in the hope that she could, finally, finish it. So that it would _stop_ , and she could finally be the normal girl that she had wanted to be ever since she had discovered that she was the Slayer.

But if she was making everyone else into weapons… what did a weapon know of peace? How could a weapon ever be at peace?

It couldn't. Of course.

She hadn't been lying when she said that she would rather see this town and everyone in it destroyed if it meant the Hellmouth died with them. But, if she kept on going as she had been, it might not come to that. She had driven off the demons before, demons that she had never even seen, and the people of the town had helped. That was only the start, she knew. She could keep going until everyone in this town was trained, until they were able to fend off a demon themselves. They could finally end the demon threat.

But if she did that, she would turn them into weapons. She had to, if there was any chance of success.

And Buffy couldn't tell if winning was worth that cost.

She didn't know how she could find out, either.

So, stretched out in front of her were two choices. She could continue. She could rally this town around her and make them into her own private arsenal. Or she could stop. Disband them. She knew this town well enough to know that it wouldn't be long before it slipped back into the mire of apathy and corruption that people like Wells had turned it into.

But she didn't know which was right. And even if she chose one of them, she would always be torn. She would always wonder if she had done the right thing. No matter which option she chose, she would always wonder if the other would have been better.

Was there any torture more exquisite than that?

Then Buffy became aware of a pressure in her head. She felt as though there was something in her skull, something moving. She felt hot, then cold. Her brain felt fuzzy, as though it was functioning normally but from a long way away.

And then a shadow took form in front of her. It looked like an ordinary shadow – her shadow – but somehow given depth. More than depth. Not only was it three dimensional, but it looked as though it existed on far more planes than Buffy could ever see.

The shade spoke, and it spoke in her voice. It spoke in the voice that sometimes bubbled up from some place deep inside herself. The voice that spoke to some ancient, primitive part of people's brains.

"You are mine, Slayer. Body and soul, you belong to me. You think that these people are tools in your hand? No. They are mine, just as you are mine. You think you are being tortured now, but you don't even know the meaning of the word. All you are is a puppet dancing on my strings. I will make you watch as you commit such atrocities that even the sun will hide its face. I will make a mockery of everything that you stand for. I will tear you down until you are nothing but a twisted wreck of what you now are. You will stand for eternity, casting down worlds and Slaying stars, and each moment you will wonder… why? You will move across this universe like a plague, and each moment you will wonder why such destruction follows wherever you go. And when each new world dies at your feet… then I will show you what you have done. I will delight as the revelation destroys you again, and again, and again. I will wear your skin and I will delight in your agony."

"They were right." Buffy said softly, as the universe came crashing down around her. There had been a veil behind her eyes, and it had lifted and now she saw. She saw her future, stretched out for eternity. She saw what she was doing, where it would lead. "They were right."

"This town will be the first of my legions. Eventually they will outnumber the very stars, and whole galaxies will tremble in fear as they wait for the moment that you appear and tear down their world."

"No."

"You can't stop me, little girl. You can't stop a single thing. I am an idea, a fear. I am eternal. I think that I will drive you to kill your friends. How will you feel, when you look at them and watch the light die in their eyes as their blood dries on your hands? Your mind is mine, Slayer. If I so chose, I could set you on fire and dance you through this town."

"No. I won't – you can't. I will be me. I am human. I am not some abomination, some puppet."

There was no expression on the shadow's face. Nothing that even resembled a face, for that matter. But she could tell that, if it had, it would have been sporting a grin worthy of a skull. "Kneel. Abase yourself before me."

She was moving even before she knew what she was doing, and even once she was aware she couldn't stop. Her body was moving despite her mind.

Seconds later, she was on her knees, her forehead pressed to the ground. Just as the Bringers had bowed before her before.

Except, of course, they had been bowing before this shadow.

"Aw, isn't that sweet. You're already on your knees. Where you belong."

Buffy looked up. Warren was standing above her, smirking. There was no shadow in sight. Instantly, Buffy's hand shot out, a punch aimed for his knee.

It was almost hard enough to break her hand. Warren, however, didn't seem affected in the slightest. His smirk widened, and then he kicked her. Buffy went flying backwards as though she had been hit by the hand of God.

"Why did you have to come after us?" Warren asked, as Buffy got to her feet unsteadily. "We could have been glorious."

A mechanical thing came bursting through the wall behind Buffy and seized her in an iron grip.

"We could have… _upgraded_ this town, but no. Some little blonde decided that she just had to intervene. Well, no longer."

He punched her in the ribs, and Buffy would have doubled over if it hadn't been for the mechanical thing holding her.

"I told you that you would burn, Slayer. And you will. You will burn, right here and now, and everyone will know that this is my town."

Buffy laughed. She didn't intend to. It just happened. It just kept on happening, echoing in odd ways, rebounding off walls until it sounded as though it would continue forever even if Buffy stopped. "Either you kill me, or I kill you. Either way… I win."

Warren bent down until he was an inch away from Buffy's face. "No. You don't."

And then the room burst into flames. Warren punched her once more and then walked out, and the flames didn't touch him.

* * *

It was hot. There were flames everywhere, and smoke was filling the room.

None of that would have bothered Buffy. She could stand there for eternity with the fire playing at her feet like a loyal puppy. She could have stopped breathing, and the smoke could fill the room in vain. Even if those things were not so, she could come apart like a shadow and burrow deep into someone else's mind. She could be somewhere else in the twinkling of an eye.

But, in the end, she did none of those things.

The mechanical thing behind her crumpled. Not because of her strength, or because of any kind of telekinesis. It just crumpled because she wanted it so, and if she wanted something then there was no way that reality was going to have a say in it.

The grip of the mechanical thing fell away, and Buffy spread her arms. Just as she had when facing the demon gang. Just as she had when she had faced Wells. Just as she had when she had faced Willow. She spread her arms and invited death for the final time.

"You might be an idea." Buffy said to the empty room and to herself. "You might be eternal. But I am human. I am not eternal. I will die, as everything that lives must. And that, I think, is beyond even you."

There was a sense of dark amusement in her head as she stood there and waited for everything to stop.

There was something else in the room. Buffy never saw it move, not through the billowing smoke, but she could see it standing in various places. It was coming towards her.

Not that that mattered, she thought, as she struggled to breathe through the smoke that was filling her lungs. She was dying.

She fell to her knees. She didn't have the energy to stand.

The last thing that she saw was the face of an angel peering through the smoke.


	16. Chapter 16

_I am a subject that says "I"_

-Simone de Beauvoir

* * *

A tall man in a suit walked out of a blue box, followed a blonde woman. "You're going to love it. Best concert in the galaxy. How often do you get to see singing whales? And the squid, well, you'll just have to…"

He paused.

The reason for the pause was a different blonde woman lying on the floor by his feet. She looked like she had been lying on her front before someone had rolled her over to see if she was okay, and upon finding that she _wasn't_ okay had then decided to make a run for it.

His companion, Rose, knelt down and tried to recall the minuscule amount of first aid that she knew. She felt for a pulse. At first, she thought she wasn't finding one because she didn't really know what she was doing, but after a few seconds she realised that the reason that she hadn't found a pulse was because there wasn't one to find.

"She's dead." Rose said dully.

The tall man in a suit hadn't moved since he'd first seen the girl. He'd just stood there, staring. There was a mildly bemused expression on her face. "It does look that way, doesn't it?"

Rose stood. "You mean… she might not be? Is she an alien or something?" She had to admit, she didn't look like she was an alien. She bore a remarkable resemblance to someone who had been in a fire, right down to blackened clothes that reeked of smoke. But what did she know? She'd seen stranger things.

"Imagine your room. One day, you go into your room, and someone has moved all the stuff around. Not much. Just a little. So little that you can't point to anything particular as different, but you can still feel that it is. You know what I'm talking about?"

Rose nodded. "There was a guy at our estate who used to swear that every night someone would turn his slippers a full 360 degrees while he was asleep. We never asked him how he could tell."

The tall man in a suit didn't seem to really be listening. "Well, it's not at all like that."

"You know, saying stuff like that isn't nearly as helpful as you think it is." Rose muttered under her breath.

The tall man in a suit knelt down and put his palm on the blonde's forehead. He looked like he was taking her temperature, or something.

And then the blonde sat up. She didn't gasp, or take a deep breath. She didn't show any sign of having been recently dead. She sat up as though that was a perfectly natural thing, which of course it was.

"Hello." The tall man in a suit said. Rose thought that he sounded guarded. "Who are you?"

"I am…" Buffy paused.

I am darkness. I am shadow. I am hope and I am light. I am eternal and I am undying. I am human and I am joy. I am death. I am alive. I am idea and I am flesh. I am I am I am.

"I don't know."

The tall man in a suit nodded, as though that was precisely the answer that he had expected. "I'm the Doctor."

Buffy blinked, and then exhaled. A long stream of smoke billowed out of her mouth.

There was something unrolling in her mind. Not a memory. It felt like something that she knew, but not something that she knew _now_. It felt like something that she was going to know in the future, something so important that it was echoing backwards through time and into her brain.

"Maybe you are now." Buffy said. She hadn't intended to speak, and she didn't really know what she was saying. "But you haven't always been."

The Doctor reared back instinctively, and Rose looked at him in surprise.

Buffy didn't notice. She was too busy dealing with the universe that had exploded behind her eyes, with the stars that were being born and dying in her brain, with the planets that dragged across the inside of her skull.

Everything was so clear now. She could look at the Doctor and see a man filled with regret, with pain and rage. And she could look at him and feel someone filled with such a childlike wonder that he would travel the universe simply to see what was there. She knew that she could tear him down with a handful of words, make him run so far and so fast that he would never stop. And she knew that she could tell him about all the lives he'd saved and the people whose lives he'd touched.

 _Do you think that I am some mewling newborn?_

There was a part of her that was old. Old beyond reckoning, so old that it didn't even make sense to wonder how old. A part of her that knew only darkness and fear. Fight or flight. A part old enough to have seen the birth of this universe and wondered… what was the point? What was the point in these creatures that cling to their suns, which die? They were just weapons in her hands. There was a part of her desired nothing so much as entropy and complete chaos, darkness and the end of all things.

And there was another part. Maybe it was new, or maybe it was just as old but she hadn't seen it before. It wasn't the part of her that had so desperately wanted to stop, had wanted everything to stop so much that there was only one way out and that was to fall. It was the part which had held onto her relationships with her friends, the part which kept her hanging on through the bad times and let her laugh. The part of her that knew that there was darkness out there and felt free to laugh in its face.

And maybe they weren't equal. Maybe there would be times when one would triumph over the other. Just like they had in the man in front of her, the killer of his own kind.

But right then and there, she didn't care. She was free, and that was all.

She grinned. "We've met before, Doctor, and we'll meet again. Look for me under different circumstances.

Buffy turned and walked into a shadow, and then she was gone.


End file.
